Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology [1 ed.] 9780803222748, 9780803210868

Citation preview

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

essay title

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

border crossings

xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

essay author

xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

essay title

Border Crossings Transnational Americanist Anthropology Edited and with an introduction by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare and Steven L. Rubenstein

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

essay author

© 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Border crossings : transnational Americanist anthropology / edited and with an introduction by Kathleen S. Fine-Dare and Steven L. Rubenstein.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-1086-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Anthropology—America—Research. 2. Anthropology—America—Methodology. 3. Anthropology—America—International cooperation. 4. Intercultural communication—America. 5. Culture and globalization—America. 6. Indigenous peoples—America. 7. Transnationalism—America. 8. America—Ethnic relations. I. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. (Kathleen Sue), 1953– II. Rubenstein, Steven, 1962– gn42.b67 2009 301.072⬘07—dc22 2008043187 Set in Scala by Bob Reitz. Designed by Joel Gehringer. xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

essay title

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction: Toward a Transnational Americanist Anthropology

Kathleen S. Fine-Dare and Steven L. Rubenstein

ix

part one — a new compass for americanist studies 1. Racing across Borders in the Americas: Anthropological Critique and the Challenge of Transnational Racial Identities John M. Norvell

3

2. The Politics of Knowledge and Identity and the Poetics of Political Economy: The Truth Value of Dividing Bridges Linda J. Seligmann

34

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

3. Reinventing Archaeological Heritage: Critical Science in a North/South Perspective James A. Zeidler

43

part two — transamerican case studies 4. Bodies Unburied, Mummies Displayed: Mourning, Museums, and Identity Politics in the Americas Kathleen S. Fine-Dare

67

5. Crossing Boundaries with Shrunken Heads Steven L. Rubenstein

119

6. Local Conflict, Global Forces: Fighting for Public Education in a New York Suburb Jean N. Scandlyn

171

7. El Envío: Remittances, Rights, and Associations among Central American Immigrants in Greater Washington dc Barbara Burton and Sarah Gammage

211

xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

essay author

8. Global Indigenous Movements: Convergence and Differentiation in the Face of the Twenty-First-Century State Les W. Field

230

9. What Can Americanists and Anthropology Learn from the Alliances between Indigenous Peoples and Popular Movements in the Amazon? Lêda Leitão Martins

247

part three — americanist reflections 10. “That’s Your Hopi Uncle”: Ethical Borders in the Field Enrique Salmón

263

11. The Dust Bowl Tango: Looking at South America from the Southern Plains Peter McCormick

274

12. The Lizard’s Dream Steven L. Rubenstein and Kathleen S. Fine-Dare

289

Afterword: Fordism, Post-Fordism, and Americanist Anthropology David L. Nugent

331 341

Index

349

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Contributors

xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Preface

An edited volume takes a long time to produce, greatly trying everyone’s patience, for each author is like a captive on a runaway bus hijacked in turn by the various delays caused by any one of the other editors or authors. We therefore offer our primary thanks to the individual contributors to this book, which began in 2003 as a session at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (aaa) held in Chicago, Illinois, titled “Moving across Borders: Re-Thinking and Re-Siting Americanist Anthropology in an Era of nafta, alca, and a ‘War on Terrorism.’” In the time since the session, three new contributions were added, fresh fieldwork and other new research were incorporated into many of the essays, and events both north and south of the Rio Grande highlighted in often tragic fashion the need to remain focused on hemispheric links. Kathy spent a semester teaching cross-hemispheric issues to students in Quito, Ecuador, and Steven left his job in Ohio for a new post focused on Latin American studies in England. In early 2007 the largely Native American–composed advisory board to the fledgling American Indian studies program at Kathy’s institution in Colorado voted to change the title and focus of the program to Native American and Indigenous Studies because, as one Navajo member put it, “We can’t exclude consideration of South Americans, Maoris, Saamis, and the other indigenous people who share our concerns.” Thanks go to Orin Starn, for providing key inspiration and encouragement that led to the original aaa session and for contributing to the panel; to Byron Dare, for his patient, incisive, and multiple reviews of

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

preface

the book (a task that seemed for him to span a decade); to David Nugent, for sticking with this project through significant professional changes; to the anonymous reviewers for the University of Nebraska Press, who provided the kinds of critique and praise indispensable to moving ahead constructively; to Elizabeth Chretien and Sara Springsteen, our patient and encouraging editors at the press; to Gary Dunham, formerly with the press and who provided much early support; to Barb Wojhoski, our superb copyeditor; to supportive colleagues at Fort Lewis College (particularly Philip Duke, then chair of the Department of Anthropology); and to the Fort Lewis College Foundation for providing some manuscript production funds. As policies and practices regarding the movement of Latin Americans into U.S. territory become more rigid even as the United States inserts its military and economic regulatory will outside its national boundaries, we often wonder what relevance there can be to refining an Americanist anthropological tradition. Kathy responded to this query in the framing comments she made at the original aaa session by saying that in the end, she really didn’t care: “I just want my students to be able to see that the skyrocketing suicide rate on the Pine Ridge reservation is somehow connected to the causes of increasing structural and physical violence in Ecuador.” If improved thinking regarding “American studies,” “Latin American studies,” or an “Americanist tradition” can serve as a better educational and organizational tool regarding unequal power flows, poverty, and hypocrisy across this continent, then we’re doing fine. If not, we Americanists of whatever variety need to continue developing our intellectual, activist, and advocacy tools in ways that go beyond the boundaries of specific academic disciplines and geographic areas. It is our hope that this book will be a small step in that direction.

viii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Introduction Toward a Transnational Americanist Anthropology

kathleen s. fine-dare and steven l. rubenstein

One cannot approach a discussion of culture that abstracts cultural symbols from form and use. And a discussion of form and use directs us to specific economic, political, and social conjunctures. William Roseberry, “Americanization in the Americas”

The “Americas” is the meeting place for some of the greatest movements in history. The ongoing encounters among inhabitants of the Americas—

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

including human beings who left Asia, Europe, and Africa by will or by force—continue to involve heterogeneous cultural, social, and political formations. Nonetheless, the relatively recent and overriding colonial nature of the European movement to the Americas has left us with a legacy of binary oppositions informed in part by an asymmetrical notion of “acculturation” that oversimplifies and misrepresents the heterogeneity of this meeting place: “colonist versus indigenous,” “Anglo-American versus Latin American,” “black versus white”—binaries that have often been used as proxies for “civilized versus savage” or “modern versus traditional” (see Derrida 1976; Roseberry 1989). We agree that America is a site of difference, but it is not the difference between the colonist and the Indian or between the Anglo and the Latino; it is the difference between thousands of different cultural, social, and political formations.

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

introduction

Nonetheless, what often serves as half of many oppositional binaries, indigeneity, has not only framed the doing and thinking of Americanist studies more than any other factor but has also been foundational to the history of anthropology (see Marzal 1998; Nutini 2001). We therefore propose to address the diversity of the American experience by taking indigeneity seriously, while simultaneously problematizing the ways people have conceptualized or understood it and in some cases fetishized it. Our stance is dual and is in part motivated by the call for an “intercultural” approach to teaching (see Whiteley 1997). As Vine Deloria made clear in his 1969 attack on anthropologists working around, with, and inside the communities of North American indigenous peoples, and as various authors have expressed regarding the “crisis of representation” in anthropological theory (Said 1978; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fisher 1986; Behar and Gordon 1995), anthropology can no longer sustain a view of the ethnographer as detached and omniscient. The first prong of our effort to reverse this stance is a reciprocal anthropology. This approach has been discussed by anthropologists such as Paul Rabinow (1977, 5) and Vincent Crapanzano (1980, 139), who have proposed a hermeneutical anthropology by which the ethnographer and his or her audience gain insight into themselves through their encounter with the people they study. This is neither a means of imposing Western knowledge on former colonial subjects nor a simple reversal, placing natives in the role of “anthropologist” and anthropologist in the role of “native.” Rather, this hermeneutical reversal is a means of exposing ourselves and our work to the critical gaze of the people we study.1 The second prong to our dual stance in rethinking Americanist studies is what Bruno Latour (1993, 100–103) calls a symmetrical anthropology. This point of view recognizes that some of the methodological and theoretical challenges associated with research on societies colonized by Europeans or on Europe’s periphery can and should be applied to centers of colonizing powers. Moreover, some of the methodological and theoretical challenges associated with “urban anthropology” or the “anthropology of complex societies” actually apply to all societies and settings. The essays in this volume provide an experiment in the Americanist x

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

fine-dare and rubenstein

tradition that employs reciprocal and/or symmetrical anthropology in challenging the boundaries and goals of traditional area studies. Since their formation at the time of industrial-based Western expansion and then during the cold war, the disciplines of anthropology, American studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies have undergone a variety of transformations. With the collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods Accord in 1973 (Bordo and Eichengreen 1993) and the end of the cold war in 1989, disciplinary boundaries are crossed more regularly as researchers seek insights from one another. Also, scholars are beginning to realize that the economic problems facing academe and academic research have the same sources as the economic and social problems they study. More recently, global border-crossing events such as 9/11, a shamefully ill-conceived war in Iraq, and concomitantly growing anti–North American sentiments across the globe have only added urgency to the plea Arif Dirlik made over a decade ago “to overcome a crisis of understanding produced by the inability of old categories to account for the world” (1994, 352). The essays in this volume address this plea by invoking pre–cold war anthropology and by confronting the impact of the most recent forms of globalization. They also address the shift between a “Fordist” era dominated by a monopoly of northern universities in representing difference, and what David Nugent (in this volume) calls “a more flexible, post-Fordist regime of power, economy, and knowledge” (see Harvey 1989; Amin 1994) where the old “Americanist studies” merge in some interesting ways with the newer “American studies.”2 We now briefly review the development of Americanist studies prior to the nineteenth century and the movement toward “critical regional studies” that emerged in a transnational, post-Fordist era. early americanist traditions The first “border” addressed by Americanist studies was an exploration of John Locke’s 1690 pronouncement that “in the beginning, all the world was America” ([1690] 1952, 35). According to Locke the trajectory of human history was marked by a great moral and technological divide between humans living in a state of society and those in possession of xi

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

introduction

government (what anthropologists would later distinguish as “primitive” and “civilized” societies). The idea that American Indians represented the earliest stages of all humanity provided a framework for early archaeological studies and museological collecting, serving as the primary rationale for an academic focus on an “other” that would be echoed in Orientalist and other intellectual, aesthetic, and collecting rationales of empire (see Fine-Dare 2002; Kehoe 1998). By the nineteenth century the fascination with American Indians expressed in the works of writers such as Montaigne and Rousseau spawned the creation of several “geographical” organizations in France dedicated to presenting, understanding, and disseminating knowledge gathered in a variety of contexts.3 One of these, the Société Américaine de France, was founded in 1857 in Paris “to encourage the study of the past life of the peoples of the American continent and was an outgrowth of the interest in this subject aroused among European scholars by Humboldt” (Fletcher 1913, 529). Discussions were held over the years regarding transforming the French society into one that would bring together all “Americanists,” a plan that was realized by a call made on August 25, 1874, to “all persons engaged in the study of America, the interpretation of its monuments, and the ethnographical writings on the races of America,” to meet in Nancy, France, on July 19–22, 1875; this encounter became the First International Congress of Americanists (ica) (Fletcher 1913, 530). According to Alice Fletcher, representatives from South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America—most notably, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society—met to establish the articles of organization, sixteen of which were adopted. The main objective, according to these original bylaws, was to contribute “to the progress of the study of the ethnography, linguistics, and historical relations of the two Americas, especially during the pre-Columbian period” (Fletcher 1913, 530). Papers delivered at the First Congress reflected the diffusionist theories of the times. Reports were given on the presence of “Old World” Phoenicians, Chinese, Buddhists, Scandinavians, and Aryans in the preColumbian New World. Subsequent congresses would straddle the line xii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

between religion and science by addressing biblical questions regarding the disposition of the world’s peoples after the flood, the presence of white men and the cross among New World indigenes before the arrival of Columbus, and evidence supporting the Mormon accounts of the reappearance of Jesus in the Americas. the american (boasian) americanists and the ica Although Franz Boas helped found the short-lived (1910–14) International School of Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico City (Stocking 2000, drawing from Godoy 1977), American anthropology would not move “decisively” into an international arena until after World War II (Stocking 2000, 179). Nevertheless, anthropologists of the Boasian tradition participated extensively in the ica before the 1940s, responding to the ica goals revised in 1900 that emphasized “the historical and scientific study of the two Americas and their inhabitants,” and which opened the door to inclusion of Boasian work on African Americans in the New World. This new focus also fit well within the Boasian paradigm of indigenous studies that had been worked out in the 1930s by Alexander Lesser and William Duncan Strong, who encouraged their students to present American Indian

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

societies and cultures in both regional and historical contexts. In 1928 the congress was held in New York City, presided over by Franz Boas. Other anthropologists who would serve a two-year stint as president of the congress were Paul Rivet in 1947 and again in 1954, Alfred Kroeber in 1949, J. Eric S. Thompson in 1952, Kaj Birket-Smith in 1956, Ignacio Bernal in 1962, Hermann Trimborn in 1968, and José Matos Mar in 1970. By the 1940s researchers affiliated with Boas and with bodies such as the Carnegie Institution, the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Viking Fund, and various universities were sending scholars to countries such as Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Peru (Comas 1950, 565) to conduct research on a variety of topics, acculturation being a particularly strong motif (see Darnell 2001 and Valentine and Darnell 1999 for excellent accounts of Boasian Americanist anthropology on both sides of the border; see also Bashkow 2004 and Castañeda 2003). xiii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

introduction

current ica trends In 2000 the Fiftieth International Congress of Americanists was held in Warsaw; it was the first time this former Eastern Bloc city had hosted the congress, signaling that the former division of the world into East and West was rapidly being replaced by an opposition between a consolidated North and the South. The guiding theme of these meetings, “Universal Messages from the Americas for the Twenty-first Century,” reflected concerns apparent in the present volume. In the preparatory address written in advance of the Fiftieth Congress, organizational committee president Andrzej Dembicz asserted that the primary challenge facing the congress was to encompass “both Americas,” “different Americas,” and that which is “common to the Americas.”4 He therefore suggested that congress participants pursue the following ad hoc issues, many of which involve border-crossing phenomena: Brazil after five hundred years: experiences, social and political challenges, both national and American Latin American societies and cultures in the United States (spaces for coexistence, competition, and expansion) Latin America in the interregional dialogue: North America-Europe-Asia Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

and Oceania-Africa; premises for the twenty-first century Religions and churches in Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century The social functions of missions in the Americas: experiences and challenges Rights to culture and self-determination: experiences and tendencies in ethnic-cultural movements in the Americas—the State and ethnicity in the Americas Processes, tendencies, and projections for regional hemispheric, and global integration in the Americas Afroamericas: experiences and empirical and theoretical projections Pothunting, archaeological tourism, and protection of cultural patrimony in the Americas: experiences and challenges for the twenty-first century Democracy in the Americas: challenges, dangers, expectations xiv

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

The Caribbean, international border: social expectations, politics, and economics for the twenty-first century Identity and Latin American thought: challenges for the twenty-first century Narcotrafficking, social development, and inter-American relations: experi-

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ences and challenges5

Regardless of whether these themes can be seen as truly “universal,” they clearly reflect the distance covered in 125 years of the congress’s existence. Although the study of indigenous peoples and their cultures is vaguely implied by many of the topics, the list excludes any explicit mention of indigenous peoples, thus collapsing their particular identities and concerns into those of “North America” or “South America.” Nevertheless, although a few of the 153 symposia presented in 2003 at the Fifty-first Congress (held in Santiago, Chile) addressed topics such as environment, gender, tourism, border crossings, and African American experiences, the bulk of the papers continued to reflect the ica’s main focus on archaeological, art historical, linguistic, folkloric, religious, and ethnohistorical research on indigenous peoples.6 As a final note, ica-inspired research has been reflected perhaps more than anywhere else in the works published in the academic journal American Antiquity, the journal of the Society for American Archaeology. When this journal split into two in 1990 with the publication of the first issue of Latin American Antiquity, many Americanist anthropologists were vexed that their cross-borders interests, not to mention the hemispherical concept of Americanism itself, were now artificially divided across the Rio Grande. In our minds at least, the work of Americanist scholars was becoming indistinguishable from that found in American studies and Latin American studies interdisciplinary programs. In some ways this is true, not so much because of the changing relations within the Americas, but because of institutional changes in American studies programs, particularly over the past decade. critical regionalism and comparative american studies An important genre of border studies concentrates on the movements of living peoples across American borders and the concomitant circulation xv

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

introduction

of objects, ideas, and wealth. This genre has its origins in a nationalist era in Americanist studies, one that has centered on the contributions and threats “outsiders” play in the building of communities, economies, and nations. The work of Michael Kearney (2004) has extended this concept and an examination of the problems it has caused by combining what he calls a “metaphoric” view of borders as cultural boundaries “that demarcate identities such as nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, and so forth” with the political-ecological view of “formal geopolitical borders” discussed in works by border-area scholars such as Robert Alvarez, Hastings Donnan, Josiah Heyman, and Thomas Wilson.7 This more geographical notion of borders informs area studies disciplines that have their roots in the growth of U.S. economic hegemony and the intrusion of cold war politics into academic disciplines such as history, literature, and political science. We will not go into the specifics of the history of area-studies programs in the United States, as excellent treatments of what Vicente Rafael calls “a North Americanist style of knowing” (1994, 91) can be found in the works of Guyer (2004), Price (2003), and Rafael (1994). However, the national security interests underlying area-studies programs noted in detail by the works of Guyer and Price have fueled a desire for change in, particularly, American studies programs over the past two decades. Whereas American studies once focused exclusively on North America, the development of what are now variously designated as “comparative American studies,” “inter-American studies,” “internationalized American studies,” or “reciprocal American studies” reflects an internationalization of the study of North America. It also indicates the desire of the funding sources for these programs to understand the roots of anti-American sentiments around the world. Finally, the launching of the Journal of Comparative American Studies in 2003 opened a valuable new space for discussing American studies beyond a North American framework (see Azam 2004; Ellis 2004; Gillman, Greusz, and Wilson 2004; Hones and Leyda 2004; Sadowski-Smith and Fox 2004; and Torres 2003). These new area studies reflect what Nugent refers to (in this volume) xvi

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

as “novel forms of Pan-American association and understanding that have emerged in the post-Fordist era.” Recognition of the changes taking place in area studies was also reflected in a Ford Foundation initiative “to build strength in area studies outside of the United States, and to broaden the perspectives of scholars and students in the United States” by awarding $12.5 million “to foster linkages between scholars in the U.S. and other regions” (Berresford 1999, vi). The introduction to the Ford Foundation report, which summarized thirty pilot projects, provides a useful summary of the origin of academic area studies, which “was in part a response to the increasing global influence of the United States, to the competition for such influence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and to postwar anxieties about the inadequacy of American understanding of the rest of the world” (Volkman 1999, viii). The hope of the Ford Foundation “Crossing Borders” project was to bring area studies into a new era, one characterized by an “explosion of interest in multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies.” In summarizing the results from the funded studies, anthropologist Toby Volkman notes three major goals for future work: (1) “to ensure that knowledge and understanding of particular places continue to be grounded in serious study of culture,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

language, and history, while finding new ways of conceptualizing ‘area’”; (2) “to create a more truly international area studies,” one that formulates “important questions about the relationships between regional and global experience”; and (3) “to influence the policy climate in the United States in order to generate stronger, sustained support for area studies” (1999, xii). In thinking about the ambitious Ford initiative and Volkman’s summary of it, we find that a sense of critical self-reflection is missing, one that asks just who benefits—beyond the academic institutions—from the new knowledges being produced and the deeper involvement of academic personnel with the lives being touched and objects and information circulated. With this in mind we decided to create the present volume, one that highlights the special skills that anthropologists bring to area studies. xvii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

introduction

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

why and how a transnational americanist anthropology? One reason that anthropologists keep a sharp eye on “the local” is, quite simply, because of what Henrietta Moore has called their “pre-theoretical commitment” to field methods such as participant observation. According to Moore the “global” is a “concept-metaphor” often invoked but rarely addressed in empirical terms. Following her discussion we suggest that “the Americas” is one such concept-metaphor, which like notions of “global, gender, the self and the body are a kind of conceptual shorthand, both for anthropologists and for others. They are domain terms that orient us towards areas of shared exchange, which is sometimes academically based. Concept-metaphors are examples of catachresis, i.e., they are metaphors that have no adequate referent. Their exact meaning can never be specified in advance—although they can be defined in practice and in context—and there is a part of them that remains outside or exceeds representation” (Moore 2004, 73). Like the concepts of “life” or “mind” employed by other sciences but never precisely nailed down, concept metaphors used by anthropologists facilitate the contextualization of something more immediate and precise.8 The concept “America” serves as an imagined, internalized, and re-created space for people who live outside the Western Hemisphere (see Hones and Leyda 2004 regarding the production of American “geographies of subject and practice” by Americanists). Moore illustrates this idea by highlighting Mark Johnson’s research on the ways that gay transgendered identities in the Philippines draw their vision of “true love relations” from ideas about American love (Moore 2004, 81; see Johnson 1997, 1998). And as many authors have noted, one of the reasons that social movements across the world oppose “globalization” is because they read the “global” as a gloss for “American” (see Azam 2004, 163; Roseberry 1989). The authors of the essays in this volume have each addressed the problem of defining, locating, and understanding the American context of their individual studies by locating their own work, or the subjects of their studies, across boundaries that are given great weight (and height) xviii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

in geopolitical terms. America has been concretized viscerally for many of these authors not only because of their physical movements through its vast space but also because of their engagement with peoples at various ends of their journeys and work. This book about studying “America” adds a dimension to the growing list of works (e.g., Goldin 1999) that examine the American experience by compiling insights from anthropologists who not only study border crossers but are themselves experientially and physically trans-American.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

organization of the book The chapters of this volume are organized into three overlapping areas of anthropological critique and inquiry that we believe to be of central importance in rearticulating the role of anthropology in the Americas, as well as refashioning American studies in a manner that decenters North America in the conceptualizing and “doing” of Americanist work. Part 1 explores some general insights drawn from comparative views applied to core anthropological concepts concerning the flow of peoples and ideas across borders; part 2 provides specific case studies of these flows as they relate to museums, migration, and indigenous movements; and part 3 examines the effects of transnational experiences on the bodies and memories of scholars who have lived and worked on both sides of several borders. In chapter 1 John Norvell asks anthropologists who write about racial categorization in the Americas to look more closely at the Brazilian experience in updating and honing theories about difference that have vigorously “raced” across borders since at least the 1920s. Norvell urges us to examine the consequences of imposing ideas of race from one place onto another, suggesting that while the North American version of “race in Brazil” may serve the purposes of college professors, it does not help people in Brazil conceptualize their situation or combat racist practices. Linda Seligmann then asks in chapter 2 how North American anthropologists—particularly those who not only study the Americas but also gain their professional livelihood by working in North American institutions—confront the “dissonant experiences . . . and the reach of power xix

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

introduction

into the practices of everyday life and the nature of institutions.” By applying her experiences working in Peru to those working and living in a Virginia suburb, Seligmann asks us to become more-engaged public intellectuals in the Americas by paying closer attention to the “small processes, big ideas, passionate beliefs, and heterogeneity that emerge daily”; and by worrying less about hegemony and more about the “substantive consequences of domination.” James Zeidler concludes part 1 (chap. 3) by invoking the origins of Americanist studies in an indigenism undergirded and justified by archaeological research. Drawing on his own extensive archaeological work conducted on the coast of Ecuador as well as on North American public lands, Zeidler discusses how the transformations that have occurred in North America as a result of federal and state laws in general, and repatriation laws in particular, may have rendered obsolete an archaeology immersed in a hemispherically integrative approach. In spite of vigorous protests surrounding Kennewick Man and the like, there is no turning back for a significantly changed archaeology, one that now balances scientific inquiry with humanistic and ethical concerns. Part 2 provides case studies that incorporate new ways of thinking about Americanist studies raised in this introduction and by Norvell, Seligmann, and Zeidler. Following the emphasis in chapter 3 on studying representations of the past, the section opens with two studies dealing with museums. Kathleen Fine-Dare (chap. 4) follows Zeidler’s concern with the relationship of indigeneity to archaeological and museum practices by exploring texts that recount reactions to the display of South American mummies in North America and Argentina by a variety of lay and professional witnesses and participants. She suggests, following an observation made by Ian Fairweather in a special issue of Social Analysis on the subject of “Anthropology, Postcolonialism, and the Museum,” that museums provide “opportunities for performances that can express a number of, often conflicting, identity strategies” (Fairweather 2004, 2). That these responses and performances take place in an emotionally charged “liminal field” where the dead and the living share space and time introduces another xx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

fine-dare and rubenstein

notion of border crossings, one essential to the possibility of realizing reciprocal relations. Steven Rubenstein (chap. 5) develops an idea of what we might learn from “face-to-face” encounters between the living and the dead by examining what Shuar migrants who accompanied him to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City thought about the display of Shuar ancestral shrunken heads, or tsantsas. As Rubenstein illustrates, the cocooning of alienated tsantsas within the walls of Theodore Roosevelt’s monument to progress very much embodies the soul of Americanism, which is the contemplation of the other among us, the peripheral within the powerful. Rubenstein’s observations concerning North Americans who hated the tsantsas acquired by their relatives but couldn’t bring themselves to do what the Shuar do—destroy or bury them—evoke a powerful image of white Americanism. Instead of getting rid of these spooky trophies, they gave them to a museum “in the center of the world,” where amnesias are curated historically, and history is remembered forgetfully in the interest of crafting identities. The next two chapters continue the thread of Rubenstein’s conversations with South Americans living in New York City by looking more closely at migratory circulations. In chapter 6 Jean Scandlyn applies her expertise working with both North and South Americans to understand the many dimensions of conflict over spending for public education in a suburban community of New York formed by many years of regionally and culturally diverse immigration. She explores the ways that public-education debates in this suburban locale illuminate deeply grounded class issues rooted in labor history, globalization, American nationalism, and other salient phenomena. In chapter 7 Barbara Burton and Sarah Gammage—both of whom have worked extensively in both academic and nongovernmental organization settings—tease apart various aspects of the social organization of remittances sent between Central Americans living in the Washington dc area and their relatives “back home.” Although the centrally stated goal of these migrants is to send cash to their home communities, the creation of this new economic source has results that go far beyond the material. xxi

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

introduction

Burton and Gammage elaborate the many ways that the rights of these U.S. residents are protected or ignored in precarious contexts, and how these migrants respond by constantly restructuring their local organizations to leverage more protection and reconfigure gender relations in the process. The final two chapters in part 2 are in some ways the most emblematic of the volume in that they return to the theme of indigeneity and indigenous activism. In chapter 8 anthropologist Les Field reflects on the ways that global indigenous movements have converged and diversified as the result of a process of international and transnational political movements. Field, who has worked with Native peoples in California, New Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Ecuador, situates American Indian movements within indigenous movements globally, including those in New Zealand, Hawaii, and Australia. Field cautions us, however, against undue optimism as we enter this “matrix” where shifting axes of economic globalization, pan-indigenous struggles, nation-state control over bodies biological and political, and the “historico-cultural legacies of inter- and intra-indigenous borders and identities” converge. Part 2 concludes with a study by Brazilian anthropologist Lêda Leitão Martins (chap. 9), who provides an excellent example of reciprocal anthropology in her critical examination of the growing alliances between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples in Brazil. For Martins, Americanist work means looking beyond culture as the sole means of mobilization for “ethnic peoples.” Culture may often be invoked strategically and pragmatically and in ways that appeal to Western notions of what Alcida Ramos (1994) has called the “hyperreal Indian” by those very people who have been harmed, like the Macuxi, by the construction and deployment of these notions. Part 3, “Americanist Reflections,” provides four accounts of the embodied and personal nature of border-crossing work in the Americas. In chapter 10 Enrique Salmón—a Rarámuri ethnobotanist who regularly conducts research and consulting activities on both sides of the border— reveals some of the multiple binds presented to him as a Native anthropologist working in the Americas. What happens, he asks, when being xxii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

fine-dare and rubenstein

becomes doing? What kinds of cultural crises and “dualistic burdens” emerge when one person tries to occupy distinct cultural, cognitive, and physical spaces? Salmón’s questions are relevant not only for the growing number of Native American anthropologists who work in the Americas but for all shape-shifting border crossers who try to integrate academic endeavors with advocacy and the realities of kincentric behavior (compadrazgo obligations topping the list) into the research gambit. Chapter 11, “The Dust Bowl Tango,” is a reflective essay written by cultural and political geographer Peter McCormick in which he traces the border crossings made by his own family members of mixed indigenous, Melungeon, Jewish, and other ancestries from Oklahoma to Buenos Aires to map the perils and promises of globalization. McCormick illustrates how globalization is often a deeply personal matter with the heart as a new territory for mapping seismic activities, drought, alienation, and revolution. His geographic work echoes the feminist geography of Altha Cravey and others that recognizes that “places are settings in which social relations and identities are constituted, while, on the other hand, space is produced through social practices operating across larger geographic domains” (Cravey 2002, 282). This point of view emphasizes that the global is not merely “context” but a dynamic realm where “place-based awareness” allows people to “shape worlds that extend beyond their everyday routines, even if these routines appear to be predominantly local” (Cravey 2002, 283–84). When we began drawing together this collection, we also began work on an opening essay that could frame and justify it. We eventually acknowledged that this essay could escape neither its dialogical origins nor its attempt to tear down (desalambrar) conceptual and embodied fences (for a rich feminist read of this concept, see Hurtig, Montoya, and Frazier 2002). We therefore decided to place what was to have been the book’s preface in the final section of the collection (chap. 12) as we reflect in counterpoint fashion the parallel journeys that led us to the creation of the project. The afterword is written by the anthropologist David Nugent, who has himself worked on both sides of the border. Nugent situates the xxiii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

introduction

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

experiences of this group of researchers in what has been called the “postFordist” phase of capitalism, where knowledge, like other types of social production, emerges in a service- and information-oriented political economy, one to which, ironically, the academy and its system of recognitions and rewards have yet to respond satisfactorily. Although some fear that all the recent attempts to “rethink” scholarly theory and practice may undermine the scientific and “value-neutral” methodological stance of disciplines long accustomed to an authoritarian voice, others view these changes with optimism (see especially Sahlins 1999). The formation of the World Council of Anthropological Associations in 2004 gave an institutional foundation to the variety of changes reflected in a field that is now much more global than Euro-American-centered and much more concerned with the relationship of lived experience to theory. What John Gledhill calls a “post-imperial world anthropology” (2005, 6) not only includes more voices of nonacademics and non-Europeans but also concerns itself with the “creation of more level playing fields on a political level” (Reuter 2005, 8). By the end of the book, we hope the reader will have moved conceptually and historically to an era of Americanist studies in which the voices of those studied take on new focus, urgency, and perhaps authority for historically oppressed peoples around the globe. One might say now, modifying Locke’s seventeenth-century pronouncement, that “in the end, all America is the world” as one looks at the ways that social movements focused on issues raised by indigenous, African American, and workingclass peoples have opened the door for a variety of collaborations, alliances, and actions of solidarity. notes 1. According to Paul Ricoeur, hermeneutics is “self-understanding by means of understanding others” (1974, 17). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has argued that this kind of reflexive hermeneutics characterizes Amazonian cosmologies: Indians understand that the way they perceive “animals and xxiv

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

other subjectivities that inhabit the world—gods, spirits, the dead, inhabitants of other cosmic levels, meteorological phenomena, plants, occasionally even objects and artefacts—differs profoundly from the way in which these beings see humans and see themselves” (1998, 470). He further argues that people’s own subjectivities are created precisely through conceptions of how others view them (what he calls “perspectivism”). Yet Viveiros de Castro’s list leaves out several equally important “subjectivities” that inhabit or move through the Amazon: traders, missionaries, and police, as well as invisible entities (which do, on occasion, take human form) such as “international human rights organizations,” “the state,” and “the world economy.” Tellingly, he also leaves out one other “subjectivity” that inhabits the world of every society we have studied: that of the anthropologist. 2. “Post-Fordism” is defined in different ways, but it refers primarily to the restructuring of social, cultural, and political relations in response to the changes that have occurred in the world economy since roughly the 1970s. These changes include new technologies, an increase in supranational neoliberalism, an increase in translocal linkages, and a decrease in national economic control. Production practices are more flexible and based on “justin-time” minimalization of inventories (opposed to the old Fordist “just in case” stockpiling of spare parts and components; Rupert 1995). Increased Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

transnationalization of labor and a reduction in job security are also characteristics of post-Fordism (see Jessop 1994). 3. Among these organizations were the American Society of France, the American Archaeological Committee, the Society for American and Oriental Ethnography, and the Society of Americanists (founded in 1895). As Pascale Riviale notes, until the second half of the nineteenth century none of the authors of “Americanist” studies could be considered specialists in the area. Many of these works were little more than compendia of reports from travelers or those who considered themselves to be followers of the tradition of “universal culture,” where expertise in any particular region was unnecessary (2000, 226–35). 4. Andrzej Dembicz, “Preparativos del 50 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Varsovia, julio de 2000,” http://www.filosofia.org/bol/not/bn009 .htm (accessed December 11, 2008). xxv

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

introduction

5. Andrzej Dembicz, “50 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas (Varsovia, julio de 2000),” http://www.ceisal98.uni-halle.de/cesla50.htm (accessed December 11, 2008). 6. Themes under the broader category “Ethnic-Social Movements, Human Rights, and Gender” include “Indigenous Rights, Dialogue and Relations to National States,” “Nationalism in the New World: The Americans and the Atlantic World in the Long Nineteenth Century,” “Linguistic Politics and Intercultural Educational Projects since Ethnic Mobilization in the Americas,” and “Transcultural Approximations of Gender and Health.” Themes under “Social, Political, and Economic Studies” include “Student Movements in Latin America: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” “Communism as a National and International Actor in Twentieth-Century Latin American Politics,” and sessions on global markets, utopian ideas, electrical energy past and present, emerging classes and the negotiation of power, and “Challenges and Tendencies in Security Policies in the Americas at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century” (51st Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Santiago, Chile, July 14–18, 2003, 2nd Circular). 7. Kearney makes reference to the work of many border scholars in his 2004 paper, most of whom focus on the U.S.-Mexican border. See, for example, Alvarez 1995; Donnan and Wilson 1994, 1999; and Heyman 1991, 1998, Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

2001. See also Kearney 1986, 1991. 8. “Culture” itself is such a metaphor—as Richard Handler puts it, we “creatures of culture . . . create the world as ‘culture’”—an inescapable creation of the human mind’s own experience of its fundamentally social life (2004, 493).

references Alvarez, Robert, Jr. 1995. The Mexican-U.S. border: The making of an anthropology of borderlands. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:447–70. Amin, Ash, ed. 1994. Post-Fordism: A reader. Malden ma: Blackwell. Azam, Kousar J. 2004. Resisting terror, resisting empire: The evolving ethos of American studies. Comparative American Studies 2 (2): 163–74. Bashkow, Ira. 2004. A neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries. American Anthropologist 106 (3) (September): 443–58. xxvi

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

Behar, Ruth, and D. Gordon, eds. 1995. Women writing culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berresford, Susan V. 1999. Preface to Crossing borders: Revitalizing area studies, by Ford Foundation. New York: Ford Foundation. Bordo, Michael D., and Barry Eichengreen, eds. 1993. A retrospective on the Bretton Woods system: Lessons for international monetary reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Castañeda, Quetzil. 2003. Stocking’s historiography of influence: The “story of Boas,” Gamio and Redfield at the cross-“road to light.” Critique of Anthropology 23 (3): 235–63. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Comas, Juan. 1950. The teaching of anthropology and the role of the anthropologist in Latin America. American Anthropologist, n.s., 52 (4) (October– December): 564–68. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cravey, Altha J. 2002. Local/global: A view from geography. In Gender’s place: Feminist anthropologies of Latin America, ed. Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig, 281–87. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Darnell, Regna. 2001. Invisible genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1969. Custer died for your sins: An Indian manifesto. New York: Macmillan. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. Third world criticism in the age of global capitalism. Critical Inquiry 20:328–56. Donnan, Hastings, and Thomas M. Wilson, eds. 1994. Border approaches: Anthropological perspectives on frontiers. Lanham md: University Press of America. ———, eds. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of identity, nation and state. Oxford: Berg. Ellis, R. J. 2004. Postamerican studies? Something is happening here. Comparative American Studies 2 (2): 131–33. xxvii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

introduction

Fairweather, Ian. 2004. Introduction. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 48 (1) (Spring): 1–4. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and nagpra. Fourth World Rising. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fletcher, Alice. 1913. Brief history of the international congress of the Americanists. American Anthropologist, n.s., 15 (3) (July–September): 529–34. Ford Foundation. 1999. Crossing borders: Revitalizing area studies. New York: Ford Foundation. Gillman, Susan, Kirsten Silva Greusz, and Rob Wilson. 2004. Worlding American studies. Comparative American Studies 2 (3): 259–70. Gledhill, John. 2005. Reinventing anthropology, anew. Anthropology News 46 (7) (October): 6–7. Godoy, Ricardo. 1977. Franz Boas and his plans for the international school of American archaeology and ethnology in Mexico. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13:228–42. Goldin, Liliana R., ed. 1999. Identities on the move: Transnational processes in North America and the Caribbean basin. Studies on Culture and Society 7. Albany ny: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies. Distributed by University of Texas Press. Guyer, Jane I. 2004. Anthropology in area studies. Annual Review of AnthropolCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ogy 33:499–523. Handler, Richard. 2004. Afterword: Mysteries of culture. American Anthropologist 106 (3): 488–94. Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of culture change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Heyman, Josiah McC. 1991. Life and labor on the border: Working people of northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886–1986. Flagstaff: University of Arizona Press. ———. 1998. State effects on labor exploitation: The ins and undocumented immigrants at the Mexico–United States border. Critique of Anthropology 18 (2): 155–79. ———. 2001. Class and classification at the U.S.-Mexican border. Human Organization 60 (2): 128–40. Hones, Sheila, and Julia Leyda. 2004. Towards a critical geography of American studies. Comparative American Studies 2 (2): 185–203. xxviii

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

Hurtig, Janise, Rosario Montoya, and Lessie Joe Frazier. 2002. Introduction: A desalambrar; Unfencing gender’s place. In Gender’s place: Feminist anthropologies of Latin America, ed. Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig, 1–18. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jessop, Bob. 1994. Post-Fordism and the state. In Post-Fordism: A reader, ed. Ash Amin, 251–79. Malden ma: Blackwell. Johnson, Mark. 1997. Beauty and power: Transgendering and cultural transformation in the southern Philippines. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1998. Global desirings and translocal loves: Transgendering and same-sex sexualities in the southern Philippines. American Ethnologist 25 (4): 695–711. Kearney, Michael. 1986. From the invisible hand to visible feet: Anthropological studies of migration and development. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:331–61. ———. 1991. Borders and boundaries of the state and self at the end of empire. Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (1): 52–74. ———. 2004. The classifying and value-filtering missions of borders. Anthropological Theory 4 (2): 131–56. Kehoe, Alice Beck. 1998. The land of prehistory: A critical history of American archaeology. New York: Routledge. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Locke, John. [1690] 1952. Concerning civil government, second essay: An essay concerning human understanding. Great Books of the Western World 35 (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume). Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fisher, eds. 1986. Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marzal, Manuel. 1998. Antropología indigenista. Vol. 1 of Historia de la antropología. 6th ed. Quito: Abya-Yala. Moore, Henrietta L. 2004. Global anxieties: Concept-metaphors and pre-theoretical commitments in anthropology. Anthropological Theory 4 (1): 71–88. Nutini, Hugo C. 2001. Aportaciones del Americanismo a la teoría y la práctica de la antropología moderna. In Motivos de la antropología Americanista: xxix

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

introduction

Indagaciones en la diferencia, ed. Miguel León-Portilla, 13–72. México, D.F.: Impresora y Encuadernadora Progreso, S.A. de C.V. (iepsa), Fondo de Cultura Económica. Price, David H. 2003. Subtle means and enticing carrots: The impact of funding on American cold war anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 23 (4): 373–401. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rafael, Vicente. 1994. The cultures of area studies in the United States. Social Text 41:91–111. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 1994. The hyperreal Indian. Critique of Anthropology 14 (2): 153–72. Reuter, Thomas. 2005. Towards a global anthropology. Anthropology News 46 (7) (October): 7–8. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. The conflict of interpretations. Evanston il: Northwestern University Press. Riviale, Pascal. 2000. Los viajeros franceses en busca del Perú antiguo (1821–1914). Trans. Edgardo Rivera Martínez. Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines (ifea) y Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Roseberry, William. 1989. Americanization in the Americas. In Anthropologies and histories: Essays in culture, history, and political economy, 80–121. New Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press. Rupert, Mark. 1995. Producing hegemony: The politics of mass production and American global power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, and Claire F. Fox. 2004. Theorizing the hemisphere: Inter-Americas work at the intersection of American, Canadian, and Latin American studies. Comparative American Studies 2 (1): 6–38. Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. What is anthropological enlightenment? Some lessons of the twentieth century. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 28:i–xxiii. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Stocking, George W. 2000. “Do good, young man”: Sol Tax and the world mission of liberal democratic anthropology. In Excluded ancestors, inventible traditions: Essays toward a more inclusive history of anthropology, ed. Richard Handler, 171–264. History of Anthropology 9. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. xxx

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

fine-dare and rubenstein

Torres, Sonia. 2003. U.S. Americans and “us” Americans: South American perspectives on comparative American studies. Comparative American Studies 1 (1): 9–17. Valentine, Lisa, and Regna Darnell, eds. 1999. Theorizing the Americanist tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88. Volkman, Toby Alice. 1999. Introd. to Crossing borders: Revitalizing area studies, by Ford Foundation. New York: Ford Foundation. Whiteley, Peter. 1997. The end of anthropology (at Hopi?). In Indians and anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr. and the critique of anthropology, ed. Thomas Biol-

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

si and Larry J. Zimmerman, 177–207. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

xxxi

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Border Crossings

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

border crossings

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

part one

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

a new compass for americanist studies

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

1. Racing across Borders in the Americas Anthropological Critique and the Challenge of Transnational Racial Identities

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

john m. norvell The purpose of this volume is to reflect on forms of knowledge production within Americanist anthropology and rethink the uses of comparison in light of cross-border flows and the global interconnectedness of the people and objects of this hemisphere. These essays also consider scholarly practices of comparison themselves as examples of these flows. One important framework of comparative knowledge construction historically has been race. The comparison of race—racial categorization, race relations, racial formations, and so on—has been, in fact, one of the most sustained and productive forms of comparative social science of the Americas since the 1940s. Classic examples include Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Marvin Harris’s Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964), Harry Hoetink’s Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of Two Variants (1971), and his Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas (1973).1 These projects have helped focus attention on patterns of colonial and postcolonial stratification and domination as well as on national and regional differences in ethnoracial formations. I argue in this essay that although cross-cultural comparisons and transnational flows of knowledge under the rubric of race have helped us to understand “patterns of race in the Americas,” in the particular case I present here, they have led to race research and policy debates in Brazil informed by inappropriate North American–based models, especially affirmative action, and have prevented us from moving on to more-nuanced

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

analyses of local patterns of inequality. This is a point made repeatedly by anthropologist Peter Fry (see, for example, Fry 1995) and, more recently, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (1999). My essay explores new ground by situating this argument for “Brazilian exceptionalism” within a broader Americanist context in which the North American “baggage” associated with race flattens and dulls comparative research carried out under its name across the Western Hemisphere. I argue that the U.S. experience is exceptional in the hemisphere. It is unfortunate and problematic, therefore, that the comparative model of race is so strongly linked to it.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

brazil in transnational race studies As anthropology entered the constructivist era along with other social sciences in the 1970s, the concept of race could no longer be taken for granted as “natural” and thus itself became an object of analysis even as it continued to be applied as a framework for comparative studies. In North American anthropology the great variety of ethnoracial systems in the former European colonies of the New World was prime material for the new approach, and examples of systems of racial categorization from Latin America, especially Brazil, have become classic cases for demonstrating the cultural construction of race in scholarship and teaching. For example, recent editions of the Conformity and Conflict reader, which is a perennial favorite in introductory anthropology courses, include a very engaging, nontechnical article written by psychologist Jeffrey Fish (2005) about the experience of his mixed-race daughter, who thought of herself as black in the United States but found herself, while living in Brazil, most frequently described by the Portuguese term morena, variously translated as “tan,” “brown,” or “brunette.” Research by American, European, and Brazilian anthropologists in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s demonstrated just how fluid and situational the use of color categories is in Brazil. My own research in Brazil has identified at least ten distinct and highly contextual social classificatory systems (Norvell 2001). Many introductory anthropology or “race and ethnicity” textbooks cite Brazil to provide a sharp contrast with U.S. views. 4

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

john m. norvell

The flow of ideas about race has long been bidirectional between the United States and Brazil.2 The thinking of key figures in the social sciences in Brazil was influenced by periods of study in the United States and direct, personal contact with both U.S. racial theorists and U.S. forms of racial otherness. Gilberto Freyre, who shaped Brazilian social science in the decades after his influential books of the 1930s (especially The Masters and the Slaves [1933] 1986a and The Mansions and the Shanties [1936] 1986b), went to Baylor University in 1918 and then to Columbia for graduate work under Franz Boas, and many important social scientists who followed him spent time studying in the United States as well. Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos, for example, was deeply influenced by his correspondence with Melville Herskovits (Guimarães n.d.) and his interactions with Ruth Landes. Landes and Edison Carneiro famously carried on an extended comparative conversation about race in their two countries (Cole 2003). Olívia Gomes da Cunha (forthcoming), Antonio Sérgio Guimarães (n.d.), and Livio Sansone (2003) have shown how deep was the reciprocal impact of Brazil on important figures of race studies in the United States, for example, Robert Park, Franklin Frazier, Herskovits, and Donald Pierson. More recently, one could point to Howard Winant and Michael Omi, who have recently incorporated Brazilian material into their theory of “racial formations,” and David Goldberg, who frequently cites Brazilian examples for his thesis that, even in the absence of explicit racial categories or overt expressions of racism, the modern state is inherently racial (2002).3 The United States, South Africa, and Brazil have also made a productive comparative trio (see, for example, Anthony Marx’s Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil [1998] and the recent collection Beyond Racism: Race and Inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States [Hamilton et al. 2001]). After the wave of race relations research in the 1950s and 1960s spurred by a unesco initiative to investigate Brazil’s “racial democracy” (Maio 2001), work in this area slowed to a crawl during the dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. During this time many university researchers working on themes of social inequality lost their jobs or were intimidated into silence 5

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

or exile. With the “opening” (abertura) period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the generals began to plan a transition back to civilian rule, academic work on inequality rebounded quickly. This includes research on race, centered now around several university-based programs founded by Brazilian social scientists steeped in the literature on race in North America.4 Both of these periods are characterized by intense interchange between North American and Brazilian scholars and activists. (I was part of this exchange; for the first year of my doctoral research in Brazil I was kindly hosted by the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos of the Cândido Mendes University, and for the second at a program on comparative racial and ethnic studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.) Key figures of the various Brazilian black consciousness movements, described best in Michael Hanchard’s Orpheus and Power (1994b), have had strong connections with the United States and often explicitly employ a hemispheric comparative framework in representing their aims. Most significant of these is Abdias do Nascimento, who held a chaired professorship at suny Buffalo and visiting appointments at Wesleyan, Yale, and Temple. Nascimento founded one of the original “black consciousness” movements in Brazil in 1931, and as an activist, actor, writer, and legislator he continues to be the strongest voice in Brazil advocating race-conscious public policy. the experience-near reality of “race” Virtually all U.S. anthropologists follow the dominant consensus that race is a sociopolitical concept with no biological basis as a meaningful way to describe variation in the human species.5 But in the United States we also tend to be acutely aware of the political risk of publicly advancing the so-called no-race position. Namely, we fear that by showing why race does not exist as a biological phenomenon we open the door to attacks on policies aimed at ameliorating or reversing the effects of persistent racism practiced on the basis of race as cultural construct. This racism results from the fact that most Americans continue to believe that “race” signifies real, underlying biological differences. Since people act on the basis 6

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

john m. norvell

of their beliefs and these beliefs support specific discursive formations and institutional structures, “race” has real, objective effects in the world. This notion, in fact, has been a cornerstone of sociology and anthropology since the early twentieth century.6 When we U.S. anthropologists write and teach, we are left in the awkward position of debunking biological race and continuing to employ a carefully redefined concept of race in the same discourse. The difficulty is twofold: First, we have not yet developed an adequate terminology for talking about social “race” that both acknowledges its persistence as a major organizing principle in many societies and addresses the pseudobiological fallacies that underpin its use by the general public. Second, there is little racial ambiguity in the United States, so the population group of self-identified whites or blacks referenced by social scientists on the basis of race as a social construction is nearly the same as the group distinguished in practice by Americans on the basis of the biological fallacy. Thus, in U.S. social science when we talk about “race” as a factor, it is really a pragmatic shortcut for something like the following: “race, as it is commonly conceptualized and employed by people and institutions in this social setting.” The differences in this area among scholars of North America are fairly narrow and partly stylistic: on the one hand, those who insist on sprinkling their texts with hundreds of ironic quotation marks (as I tend to do) and, on the other, those who think it sufficient to make perfunctory reminders about the constructed nature of the category and move ahead, sometimes in spite of the active contestation and negotiation of the meanings of racial terms within American racial politics. The power of a hegemonic discursive formulation, the biological basis of race in this case, means that resistance to it tends to adopt the same terms, for reasons of tactics or expediency. Thus Jean-Paul Sartre calls for “anti-racist racism” (Sartre [1948] 1988) and Spivak (1996a, 1996b) for “strategic essentialism.”7 We might say, using the still-useful distinction of Clifford Geertz (1974), that there is a high degree of confusing and problematic overlap between the analytical, “experience-distant” categories of social science and the 7

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

“experience-near” terms employed in everyday life in North America. In Geertz’s example, the category of the person can be used to analyze and compare local notions about the nature of the self and its relations to and points of articulation with society. Less scientistic and absolute than “objective” and “subjective,” Geertz’s terms describe the way ethnography shifts focus between the local and the scholarly, comparative models. The problem arises when words such as “race,” “ethnicity,” “Latino,” and so forth appear frequently as analytical terms in scientific writing but also have vibrant, fluid, and politically charged “experience-near” careers in American daily life.8 “Ethnicity,” introduced by sociologists in the 1950s, has now entered public discourse in ways that sometimes stray far from original scholarly intentions, namely, to designate those forms of diversity in American life that transcend social class (Sollors 1978). “Racial formation,” a term coined by Omi and Winant (1986), has among its advantages the fact that it introduces at least a small gap between scholarly language and the everyday expression of “racial” experience. Latin America, however, presents a problem different from that of the United States, where the analytical and the experience-near so closely overlap and blur. Not only do racial categories in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas not map directly onto ours (the elementary point of the Jeffery Fish essay mentioned at the beginning of this chapter), but the concept of “race” itself is highly variable. Consider the well-known fact that the English term “race” has no adequate equivalent in Brazil—adequate, that is, for eliciting responses from native informants that are comprehensible within a “race relations” paradigm. Fish suggests that tipo, or “type,” elicits answers that seem “racial,” but tipo, like raça, the obvious cognate etymologically, is used very loosely to refer to many different types of “types,” not just physical appearance. In legal and academic discourses, raça refers to an ill-defined global concept of “race.”9 In journalism and everyday discourse, however, one hears other meanings, as in this sport headline from O Globo, one of Brazil’s largest daily newspapers: “Vasco plays with race, ties Cruzeiro.”10 Here it means an attitude or desire, implying perhaps authenticity or “breeding.” Raça is also commonly used to refer to region, occupation, or soccer 8

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

john m. norvell

team fandom: seemingly any kind of formative or affectively experienced group membership. Some will want to call these metaphorical extensions of a core concept of racial difference, but as I argue elsewhere (Norvell n.d.), these terms obtain their significations within a complicated field of indexicality that resists the interested etymologies that would distinguish primary and parasitic meanings. The Brazilian census interviewers ask about “color” (cor) as a proxy for “race,” and most Brazilianist demographers and sociologists accept them as synonyms. That is, the census or survey asks about “color,” and scholars report the data as “race,” offering a brief, perfunctory caveat. But a famous 1976 study carried out by the census agency found that if the census takers did not mention the four official categories and instead let respondents answer in their own terms, they were buried by a blizzard of highly descriptive and inventive “color” terms—135 of them, in that study (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística 1980).11 Marvin Harris has reported the existence of nearly five hundred different terms (1970). As Oracy Nogueira has argued ([1954] 1985), color labels are applied descriptively and without implying descent or origin. Even these “color” terms often connote other aspects of physiognomy, especially hair, or refer to specific social roles involving far more than physical appearance, the famous mulatas of samba and carnival, for example. Even if one collapses the 135 terms into seven “modal” categories and discards minor colloquial expressions, as Nelson do Valle Silva does (1981), obviously something very different than U.S. “race” is being measured.12 Take my personal favorite of these color terms: the color of a “fleeing burro” (burro quando foge). This set of respondents is arguably using color precisely to resist “race”: I’m of indefinite color. To claim this person is really some kind of brown, and therefore nonwhite, and therefore “AfroBrazilian” is a form of scientific-symbolic violence and should be resisted, even if it means that one’s neat, clean data escapes along with the burro into the countryside! Edward Telles’s recent book, Race in Another America (2004), seeks to clarify differences and similarities between the United States and Brazil, ultimately aiming to “develop a global theory of race relations.” To justify 9

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

this globally comparative goal, one would have to define race quite carefully, which Telles acknowledges in his introduction: Because race is a controversial and sensitive topic, I prefer to define the concept early on. As is the consensus in sociology, race is a social construct, with very little or no biological basis. Race exists only because of racist ideologies. In the West, which includes Brazil, nineteenth-century scientific theories established that humans could be divided into distinguishable racial types, which were hierarchically ordered according to an ideology establishing that such characteristics are correlated with a person’s intellectual and behavioral traits. Even though such theories are currently discredited by the vast majority of the scientific community, beliefs in the existence of races are embedded in social practices, giving the concept a great influence on social organization. By race relations, I believe that Robert Parks’ . . . definition, which he wrote in the 1930s, of “relations that exist between individuals conscious of race differences” continues to be applicable, even though he denied that race was important in Brazil and would sometimes invoke essentialistic or biological distinctions. This definition avoids the idea of race as based on a group identity that is common in the United States but is often inappropriate

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

for Brazil. Race is important because people continue to classify and treat others according to societally accepted ideas. . . . I can empathize with a concern that the use of the term “race” reifies social distinctions that have no biological value, but race continues to be immensely important in sociological interaction. (Telles 2004, 21)

The careful reader will note that nowhere in this passage is race actually defined without recourse to “race” or “racial,” nor is it defined at all for Brazil. Look closely at the logic of this passage: Race means types and hierarchy. Though now discredited, this conception informs social practices and “societally accepted ideas.” Race relations exist where people are conscious of race distinctions, making the concept applicable to Brazil, although Brazilians do not perceive racial group identities. So, what is it that they are conscious of? 10

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

Concepts like race vary in their connotations in different languages, as they evolved out of distinct cultural contexts. For example, color is more commonly used in Brazil, while race is more common in the United States. Choosing race instead of color is understandable in English but clumsy in Portuguese and Spanish. Nevertheless, I find race and color in Brazil to be analytically similar and derived from similar racial ideologies. I thus decide to use the term “race,” which underlies both concepts. I further describe my thinking on this at the beginning of chapter 4.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

(Telles 2004, 22)

In chapter 4: “Another difference between the two countries is in the use of the ‘race.’ In Brazil, rather, the term côr [the use of the diacritic is archaic] (‘color’) is more commonly used than race. Color is often preferred because it captures the continuous aspects of Brazilian race concepts in which groups shade into one another, whereas race in Brazilian Portuguese (raça) is mostly understood to mean ‘will power’ or ‘desire’” (Telles 2004, 79). Thus Brazilians are conscious of color. It is quite clear from this passage that raça is not “race.”13 Cor, Telles claims, is really race, although it is preferred (he does not say by whom) precisely because it rejects the very notion he has just defined as race, that is, noncontinuous, distinct groups. If Brazilians reject the notion of race and have no term for it, it could still be demonstrated that social practices are structured by race. But the body of work that purports to do so (for example, Telles 1993; Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Wood and Carvalho 1988; Silva 1985) uses statistical techniques applied to data extracted from census surveys based on cor, which, as we have seen, when unmoored from the tautological assumption that it is really race, diffuses into a formidably continuous description of the minutiae of skin tone and hair texture. The reader has just been sucked down the rabbit hole of Brazilianist raciology.14 is there race in brazil? Audrey Smedley (1999, 28–29) has identified the characteristics of the North American race concept that distinguish it from premodern forms of ethnic or somatic prejudice (i.e., those in evidence prior to the period of 11

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

European exploration and colonization, which began in the fifteenth century): first, a notion of discrete and unchangeable racial groups based on heritable characteristics; second, a belief that outer appearance points to inner reality; and third, a ranked hierarchy of value. Allowing that some form of in-group identification and chauvinism is probably universal, she argues that race as a cognitive, political, and economic principle of social organization is the particular accomplishment of northern European colonization from about the late seventeenth century. Even though Latin Americanist historiographers have frequently employed race when writing about the place of Indians and African slaves and their descendants in the Iberian colonies, it is possible that for at least some countries and periods, Smedley’s criteria would not be met. Although I leave the question of the applicability of the term “race” in specific historical periods in other Latin American countries to their respective specialists, I argue that “race” should be totally abandoned in Brazilian studies. We can reject or remain suspicious of simplistic accounts of Iberian versus British slavery and colonization (Sweet 1997) and still recognize that the particular social processes involved in Brazilian independence, abolition, and republican nation building have shaped a society today in which none of these elements described by Smedley prevails. The obviously disproportionate composite pattern of skin tones with respect to class combined with the legacy of racial slavery in the past admittedly make this fact hard to see for North American eyes.15 Although many studies seem to show that skin color is a predictor of life chances based on a variety of objective measurements (for example, Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Silva 1985; Telles and Lim 1998; Wood and Carvalho 1988), most Brazilians of all shades and classes generally believe that race mixture has been so pervasive that “color” is a matter of degree and that discrimination, even when couched in color terms, is more accurately thought of as based on social-class factors. Far from being a surface indicator of inner essence, skin color is widely acknowledged by Brazilians to be potentially misleading in everyday interactions. As I have described (Norvell 2001), when a middle-class or wealthy Brazilian person’s dark skin results in a doorman directing her to 12

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

john m. norvell

the service elevator of an apartment building or a maitre d’ denying him admission to a restaurant or club (still common occurrences), the ensuing revelation of that person’s social-class credentials results in embarrassment, lawsuits, and prosecution. Conversely, when a light-skinned person begins to speak with the dialectic markings of the impoverished urban periphery or rural interior, any benefit of the doubt given on the basis of outward appearance quickly recedes. Brazilian racism is, in short, generally a form of “profiling,” as opposed to the often deeply essentialist prejudice commonly described in the United States. This said, there is also no doubt that Brazil is a deeply inegalitarian and stratified society riven by a great many deeply seated social prejudices, including aesthetic ones with serious implications for the reproduction of social inequality. Brazil may well be a “pigmentocracy” in which lighter individuals do better on average than darker ones in almost all ways, but it is not a “racial” system because there are no distinct racial groups and no notion of inner essence. There is aesthetic prejudice against traces of blackness (as well as contexts in which it is prized), and a whole host of forms of social discrimination that entail from it, but it is relative and continuous, rather than absolute and discrete. The tautologies of race and color compound further, for the ethnographic work of the 1950s and 1960s (Harris 1970; Hutchinson 1957; Wagley 1952) also shows that perception of social class influences the choice of a “color” term for self or others. It is hardly surprising that color correlates strongly with the various components of social class (income, education, health, etc.) because as a variable it already partly implies this. Not only is cor not race; it is not even exactly “color.” It is phenotype, broadly, mixed with a subjective awareness of class. Telles demonstrates that some “whitening” or “darkening” of classification occurs, at least by respondents at the upper end of the economic scale and in some regions of Brazil, yet he persists in claiming that “racial classification clearly affects one’s life chances in Brazil” (2002, 418). But it is better seen as a reflection of others’ perception of one’s probable life chances and life experiences. Racial classification reflects one’s social capital, of which skin color is a constituent but not determinative part. 13

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

This phenomenon of “social race” means that sociometric analyses that crunch “color” (represented by census or censuslike data) against wealth, education, and so on, are nearly useless as evidence on this question. If the likelihood of a given person labeling himself or herself with one of four “color” categories or being so labeled by others varies with the subjective judgment of social-class status, then sophisticated statistical analyses of these color “groups” against variables such as income, educational attainment, consumption, and so forth, produce meaningless precision because they are not based on independent variables. Telles bemoans the absence of nonanecdotal evidence (2004, 14), but it is far from clear what kind of data could ever resolve this issue, since, as he himself points out (96), whitening or darkening must be imagined to be occurring relative to some objective, phenotypic “race.” Extrapolation from census-based classification data also assumes—incorrectly, according to my research—that the classificatory thinking imagined by the census interviewer is the same as that evoked in the respondent by the question, “What is your color?” It also assumes that the latter is the same mode of thought as that which structures moments of potentially discriminatory social action in other, more real-life contexts: the job interview, the police stop, marriage or dating, classroom interaction, governmental acts, and so forth. Simply because questioner and perhaps respondent think discretely and predominantly phenotypically in a census or censuslike encounter, we cannot assume that either the discreteness or the meanings of color categories transfer to other contexts. The basic error here is in confusing “category” with “group,” where categories are collective identifications imposed by others, and groups are collectivities with a self-defined identity and “mutual recognition on the part of its members” (Jenkins 2004, 81). The categories in this case emerge from census data collected with demographic terminology quite different from that observed in natural settings. The claim that there are no racial “groups” in Brazil was made quite clearly in the literature from the 1950s and 1960s cited above, and my research (Norvell 2001) confirms this fact in the 1990s, in Rio de Janeiro at least. The fact that the morphology of Brazilian inequality is more diffuse 14

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

and blurry with respect to skin color than in some other societies does not attenuate the moral dimensions of inequality and prejudice, but— and this is the crucial point—it does call for different analytic techniques and different political strategies than those appropriate for studying a truly racialist social formation. This approach is not being taken. Instead, conscientious Brazilianists write in ever more convoluted ways as they continue to frame their observations as “race” even while acknowledging the difficulties in doing so.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the persistence of race Several factors—all transnational in nature—have kept race alive in Brazilianist scholarship. First, the shared legacy of African slavery and conquest of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas provides a historical framework that invites comparison between the postcolonial, postabolition social orders that emerged. The particular salience of indisputably racist societies in the former British colonies around the globe has helped to keep the terminology of “race” integral to the language of comparison. Postcolonial social formations exhibit enough patterned similarities that it is tempting to neglect the often profound differences. The comparison of social formations across the Americas under the rubric of “race,” as heuristically useful as it is for putting the overly naturalized and entrenched North American notion in perspective, has had the added consequence of keeping race on the table as the appropriate term for talking about social difference in Latin America. The U.S.-Brazil comparison, in particular, has been perpetuated in the scholarship of both countries since at least the 1920s owing to the interchange between Brazilian and American scholars mentioned earlier. No matter how radically different Brazilian society appears in their respective accounts, the transnational discipline of race relations ensures that the comparative framework continues to be identified as pertaining to “race.” Second, through the proliferation of programs and centers, professorial lines and fellowships, conferences and panels, courses, journals, textbooks, and so on, all defined around race—a veritable subindustry of raciology—many of us depend on the continued salience of the term to 15

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

give meaning to our career trajectories. One thinks of Michel Foucault’s account of the history of sexuality as an object of study and the raison d’être of institutional arrangements oriented around its elaboration.16 Racial and ethnic studies today are, of course, explicitly dedicated to undoing the effects of its object, namely, racism, and thus diametrically opposed to the racist goals of the racial-studies disciplines from which they are descended. But the institutions of raciology are as totally dependent on the continued existence of “race” as a transnational object as was the earlier racist science. Finally, public policies promulgated in the name of “race” are powerful forces that pull diverse popular understandings in line with the monosemic comparative discourse of race relations. The tendency of Brazilians, until fairly recently, to deny even the existence of color prejudice makes the critique of “race” in Brazilianist scholarship seem to be a politically risky one, however.17 Without recourse to the internationally recognized struggle against “racism,” it is possible that no government efforts against prejudice and discrimination would be plausible at all. The Brazilian constitution and several federal laws are quite explicit in establishing the illegality of “racism” and “racial discrimination” and offer one of a precious few tools presently in existence for combating inequality. Without other legal mechanisms on the horizon, reluctance to let that one go is understandable.18 Within the last few years, some surprising policy initiatives in Brazil have breathed new life into a universalist conception of “race” there. Brushing aside accusations that they have imported a language of race and redress from the United States, activists in the state of Rio de Janeiro, centered in a network of nongovernmental organizations (ngos) and academic centers, many of them funded by the Ford Foundation with its well-known agenda for racial justice, managed to get passed, with very little public debate and against at least some public backlash, affirmative action programs for the university systems of several states, including Rio de Janeiro, as well as the federal University of Brasília and the Ministry of Justice. These programs are as rigid and quota-based as anything in the ongoing, forty-year-old experiment in the United States and have 16

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

prompted an unprecedented public debate about the meaning of race and the best ways to deal with social inequality.19 But as the polar language of “nonwhites” and “whites” creeps into and establishes itself ever more deeply in public discourse in Brazil, as in the affirmative-action debates and much of the social science research that its supporters draw on, the work of several generations of scholars on the nuances of color and class is dismissed as trivial and obfuscatory at best, and at worst, complicit with the ideological self-justifications of the Brazilian upper classes. Indeed, most literature reviews in Brazilian race studies dismiss the whole body of work from the 1940s to the 1960s mentioned above as too much under the sway of the “racial democracy myth” without challenging the empirical data itself.20

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

polemics in brazilian raciology Inevitably, academic responses to the recent rise of race-explicit policies have become acrimonious. Most pointed has been the polemic, during about the last ten years, carried on principally between Peter Fry and Yvonne Maggie (see, for example, Maggie and Fry 2002), anthropologists at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, on one side, and sociologists and political scientists on the other, led especially by Antônio Guimarães (2001a, 2001b). To a certain extent this polemic follows familiar lines with the social sciences about ethnographic versus quantitative data. Anthropologists tend to stress the on-the-ground complexities of social identity, while quantitatively oriented social scientists argue that when you analyze the numbers races appear whether they are reflected in discourse or not. Fry and Maggie argue against a too-quick recourse to racially explicit policy implementations, while Guimarães sees racialist language in legislation and journalism as long-overdue recognition of the depths of Brazilian hypocrisy and prejudice. Historians and social scientists in the United States and Brazil generally detour around the polemic while publishing article after article endlessly announcing the death of the “myth of racial democracy” in a recursive cycle of myth making. Anthropologists in both the United States and Brazil have been largely absent from the furious responses to Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant’s 17

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

polemical article “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason” (1999). In this piece Bourdieu and Wacquant argue that Brazilian racial reality has been increasingly forced into a U.S.-based framework of race, a victim of American “cultural imperialism” (41) and “the actual ‘globalization’” (46) of “the U.S. folk-concept of ‘race’ as a result of the worldwide export of U.S. scholarly categories” (48; italics in original). They finger philanthropic organizations, the publishing industry, and scholar-activists for facilitating the “cunning of imperialist reason.” The notable exception is Peter Fry, who published an article at least partially sympathetic to the Bourdieu and Wacquant argument (2000). Although largely sympathetic to their argument, Fry criticizes Bourdieu and Wacquant for overgeneralizing and reifying not only an apparently homogeneous American society as the source but also the Brazilian academic scene, where, he says, many researchers, students, and ngo staff members are, in fact, resistant to a reductive racial framework. This may be so, but they have been largely losing the battle for public opinion and legislative attention, as recent policy shifts and the apparent public support (Telles and Bailey 2002) for these shifts would indicate. Other attacks on the Bourdieu and Wacquant piece have come from John French, political scientist Michael Hanchard, and sociologist Edward Telles. French (2000) defends the Hanchard book (1994b) that is singled out for special criticism, arguing—correctly, in my view—that it is far more nuanced than Bourdieu and Wacquant acknowledge. Hanchard follows (2003) with a defense of his own against the broad and sometimes rash strokes in the essay. His book Orpheus and Power is a history of Brazil’s black movements that shows how the political hegemony of elites worked to forestall the broader racial subjectivity as blacks that would seem necessary for a successful civil rights movement. Hanchard’s other published piece on Brazil that year (1994a) would have been a much more vulnerable target for Bourdieu and Wacquant’s criticism, however. “Black Cinderella” interprets a case of a physical and verbal assault on the dark-skinned daughter of the governor of the state of Espíritu Santo. With blurry terms such as “racialization,” Hanchard argues that a “focus on the numerous color categories in Brazilian racial politics can obscure the 18

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

john m. norvell

broader racialized social totality in which these categories operate and the racial meanings which structure social interactions and limit individuals’ ability to simply choose their own racial category” (177). The problem is that the terms and associations that structure the totality are themselves never reducible to somatic or genetic meanings or essentialized group characteristics. That Brazilians negotiate their identities within a charged field of stereotypes and structured inequalities in which physical features play a role is not in doubt; the choice of “race” as the key to understanding this field is not obvious, however. Telles, an American sociologist, served as program officer for the Ford Foundation in Brazil during a key period in the expansion of affirmativeaction talk (1997 to 2001). His response (2003) to Bourdieu and Wacquant, who quite plausibly single out Ford as a major exporter of U.S. race thinking, is mainly a defense of Ford’s funding priorities in Brazil. He argues that, although the largest funder by far of race-related research in Brazil and the primary source of support for most of the groups who have called for race-explicit public policies, Ford has always been cautious about “mindlessly imposing U.S.-centric views on other societies” (Telles 2003, 33). He paints a picture of Brazil’s black-movement activists organically developing interest in racial quotas on their own, uninfluenced by U.S. racial concepts and civil rights mechanisms. His article is defensive and focused on denying direct coercion or undue influence in specific and recent interactions. I cannot dispute these facts, but it seems naive to focus narrowly on these details and ignore the impact of decades of scholarly exchanges and the global influence of U.S. science in this area. My point is not that Brazilian scholars are incapable of adapting racial theories to Brazilian cases, but it would hardly be surprising that such sustained and generous funding parceled out under the rubric of “race relations” would encourage scholarship and activism that fits within its conceptual limits. It is also worth noting that Telles’s work on Brazilian inequality (such as that discussed above), like that of many other Brazilianist sociologists, is based wholly on the quantitative analysis of census and formal survey data, which classifies individuals into a small number of color categories 19

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

understood to represent “race.” Abandoning race as an analytic framework would entail an extensive reworking of his data, at minimum, and could possibly be seen to vitiate it. All four of these critiques raise some fair objections to Bourdieu and Wacquant’s sweeping claim, pointing out, for example, that “U.S. imperialism” cannot explain the interest in race in Brazil, given that most of the typically imperialist corporate and government interests would hardly be interested in exporting U.S.-style antiracism. (Bourdieu and Wacquant suggest, somewhat cryptically [1999, 50–51], that it is perhaps precisely the counterhegemonic role of race and racism in U.S. history that appeals to Brazilian intellectuals and activists engaged in their own counterhegemonic tactics against both the North and the Brazilian elite, a fact that French notes and dismisses [2000, 109].) But none of the critiques effectively negates the fact—incontrovertible, in my view—that an inadequately relativized and largely North American conception of race underpins the postdictatorship race relations oeuvre in Brazilian studies and has entailed the ever more brusque dismissal of the complex, experience-near terms of everyday life in Brazil. Recent ethnographic books and articles on “race” in Brazil, including those by France Twine (1997), Robin Sheriff (2001, 2003), Jonathan Warren (2001), Donna Goldstein (1999), John Burdick (1995, 1998), Cecila McCallum (2005), and Livio Sansone (2003), provide no useful models either. These publications offer moments of nuanced analysis of forms of inequality in Brazil, some more than others. They are more sensitive to the discourses of everyday life than Brazilianist research appearing in sociology and political science, but their books and articles all employ terms such as “nonwhite,” “Brazilians of color,” “Afro-descended,” and the like. In some cases heavy-handed interpolation of polar English race terms and translations that flatten lexical subtleties mar otherwise sensitive ethnographic reporting. Their ethnographic data reveal complex social settings in which color interacts with and marks broad and pernicious prejudices and discriminatory practices, but the tug of raciology leads these ethnographers to inflect their interpretations to the rhetorical dictates of the race-relations model. 20

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Even in Sansone’s Blackness without Ethnicity (2003), which is explicitly an attempt to represent the complex cultural politics of concepts of blackness and race, the author uses the term “Afro-Brazilian” in an analytic way and falls into a rhetoric of almost evolutionary inevitability, talking about “blackness” as a mode of color consciousness that many “Afro-Brazilians” have not yet attained. Since “Afro-Brazilian” is not used as an identity label in Brazil but is heard only in narrow academic and political arenas, its use as a designation for a group of people necessarily implies a kind of blood-quantum logic I once thought had been exorcised from scholarly writing. Doubly problematic is the fact that in Brazilian cultural politics it is a tendentious term specifically employed to try to change the way Brazilians think and talk about color. These anthropologists have largely steered clear of the polemics mentioned earlier, however, and rarely note that the analytic language they employ is itself the focus of sharp debate. Anthropologists are loath to appear to essentialize the “true nature” of any society. Some Brazilian opponents of black-movement efforts have, like Bourdieu and Wacquant, tried to brand the antiracist activists as illegitimate for importing foreign concepts; this clearly essentializes “Brazil” and fails to acknowledge the significance of the global, diasporic politics of which the movement is a part. However, other observers of this growing racial politics in Brazil have let the politically loaded terms of the black movement—“Afro-descended,” “Afro-Brazilian,” “nonwhite”—enter their writing as if they were meaningful analytic categories. This leaves them unable to critique the movement’s questionable claim to speak for all Brazilians “of color” as part of the inevitable emergence of a global “Afro” tradition repressed within, but distinct from, “Brazilian” culture. The absence of these terms in the everyday discourse of most Brazilians can then only be theorized as “silence,” “repression,” or “invisibility”—a facile rhetorical strategy if unaccompanied by evidence of why they should be there in the first place. We anthropologists also tend to be hesitant about advocacy and often disguise it in a neutral language of empirical description. I obviously have grave reservations about Brazilian affirmative action for the reasons 21

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

racing across borders in the americas

I have suggested in this essay, namely, that it introduces into Brazilian law and regulation a “racial” criterion for benefits that is far more rigid and reductionist than the complex lived categories of Brazilian life, which shape, after all, the discursive formations through which patterns of inequality are reproduced. The backlash from the implementation of such polices, tolerable in the United States because of the far greater clarity of the terms by which discrimination proceeds and the clearer and more efficacious gains such policies achieve, could set back or even destroy the possibility for broader social-justice goals in Brazil. These are questions of strategy and efficacy, however, and I respect and admire the commitment to antiracism of those who support such policies in Brazil. (I do, however, bristle when mine is questioned.) My argument here is that whether we as scholars wish to see movements such as Brazilian affirmative action succeed or fail, we should state our opinions directly instead of writing the anthropology of Latin America in such a way as to make this truly novel turn of events appear expected all along. “Racial” identity is not inevitable in Brazil, and it is not necessary for the development of stronger civil rights and social equality. “Race” has been employed as the analytic fulcrum that allows important hemispheric and global comparison and social critique to take place, and those scholars who do so act in good faith and with good intentions. Yet they fear, I believe, that eschewing “race” will deprive them of comparative scope and moral suasion (hence the political correctness of the matter, to use a term that has enjoyed a third life in Brazilian debates about quotas [see Fry 1991]).21 Neither fear is justified. New frameworks of potentially greater power and subtlety are emerging all the time (diaspora, hybridity, etc.). And “racism,” already employed in Brazilian public discourse to refer to diverse forms of social discrimination, marks a recognition and potential commitment to the more equitable distribution of resources and opportunity that a just society requires. We owe both our scholarly and activist audiences the most honest critical analysis we can provide. Brazilians have given Americans, Americanists, and comparativists of all kinds great case-study material for our teaching and research. What we can do in return is reframe the comparative 22

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

project in ways that can help Brazilian scholars and the general public to participate fully and equally in the hemispheric flows of knowledge production. This means that we comparative scholars of the Western Hemisphere must loosen our grip on the concept of “race.” This essay is really a plea: non-Brazilianists haven’t paid too much attention to these polemics in Brazilian studies as far as I can tell. Americanists, and all anthropologists, who have gotten so much mileage from the Brazilian color categorization literature for their pedagogy and scholarship, owe it to us to challenge the tacit contradictions between that classic literature and the newly re-racialized language of more recent work. The Brazilian case is but the most stark one, and I think it points to similar issues in border-crossing Americanist work in general. From the Andes to Mexico to the Caribbean, the differences in ethnoracial formations are considerable, and scholarship that grounds its analysis on “race” must invariably point this out, which suggests that a better framework is needed instead. notes I would like to thank Stanley Bailey, Dan Segal, Kathy Fine-Dare, and Steve Rubenstein for their patient readings and rereadings of this essay and their Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

perceptive and useful comments. 1. These studies were part of a global interest in comparative race studies in the wake of the horrors of Nazi racism and in light of the new “evolutionary synthesis” that had emerged in population biology by the 1940s (see Marks 1995, 2002; Mayr 1982). The latter emphasized polymorphism and local genetic variation and reinforced the attack on racialist studies already begun by the Boasians (see Baker 1998; Williams 1996). 2. As a Brazilianist I limit myself in this essay to the Brazilian case; I am certain, however, that a similar case could be made for mainland Spanish America and the Caribbean. 3. Omi and Winant define racial formation as “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (1986, 61). 23

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

4. The impact of the dictatorship and abertura on race scholarship in Brazil is described by Mitchell (1985) and Skidmore (1985). These authors suggest that the generals held a special animus for race studies; others (Elio Gaspari, pers. comm., May 2005) think that race scholars were also seen as leftists and troublemakers and persecuted largely on that basis. 5. It is important to note that recent arguments by a few geneticists for the utility of the race concept are being widely reported on in the mainstream U.S. press, invariably in a way that makes it look as if the question of whether race is “real” has been reopened. Irrespective of narrow questions raised by the most recent genomic techniques, the fact remains that lay conceptions of race have nothing to do with these nuances and are fully cultural constructions and discursive formations. (See Sarich and Miele 2004 and Armand Leroi, “A Family Tree in Every Gene,” New York Times, March 14, 2005, a23, for recent advocacy for the return to race. See also the critical essays recently published in response by the Social Science Research Council: http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/ [accessed December 11, 2008].) 6. The earliest articulations of this idea in social science are found in Durkheim’s notion of the social fact as the object of sociological analysis ([1895] 1982) and Thomas’s (1923) even more specific and relevant programmatic claims. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

7. Paul Gilroy has argued against this practice, not for reasons of analytical clarity but because of the political danger associated with race-based political movements (2000). 8. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) have made this same argument about the term “identity,” and Wacquant has advanced a similar argument about the “ongoing traffic between folk and analytical concepts” of race (1997, 223). 9. Brazilian laws frequently employ a formulation of the right to freedom from prejudice based on “origin, race, sex, color, age, or other forms of discrimination,” and scholarly publications have referred to the “question of race” for decades. 10. “Vasco joga com raça, empata com o Cruzeiro . . . ,” O Globo, http://oglobo .globo.com/online/esportes/default.asp (accessed December 11, 2008). 11. At the time the official categories were “white,” “brown,” “black,” and “yellow,” but they now include a fifth category, “indigenous.” 24

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

12. There is now a substantial body of literature on the question of the meaning and validity of the census terms. See Nobles 2000 for a summary of this meta-debate, which continues unresolved and unabated. 13. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I maintain that under these circumstances it is not even valid or useful to say that raça means “race” in Portuguese. Etymologically, of course, they are related (Smedley 1999, 37–41), but the term enters English from Latin (or maybe Arabic) after its diffusion through the various Romance languages. Why should the English meaning be the reference here? Raça does, in fact, also mean “race” in Brazil but in contexts where the transnational object of international raciology has already been retranslated back into Portuguese, as in “the racial question” (a questão de raça). 14. I take this term from Memmi 2000. 15. Anecdotally, I have heard Brazilians say that time spent in the United States has led them to see formerly invisible patterns of racism on return to their own country. I do not doubt that exposure to the more explicit and ubiquitous forms of North American discrimination opens their eyes to the scale of Brazilian inequality, but I do challenge the implication that they are now seeing a true, underlying “racial” reality for the first time. 16. Foucault (1978) demonstrated that “sexuality” emerges as an object of both Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

scientific study and state control from the sixteenth century onward (an example of the nexus of power/knowledge). The comparison with raciology is instructive: both “sexuality” and “race” make bodies scrutable and subject to various disciplinary regimes. They also offer paths of resistance, but at the cost of reproducing their reification as objects. 17. Recent work makes much of the fact that many Brazilians now admit to the existence of “racism” in their country. The large-scale, questionnairebased study carried out by the Folha de São Paulo newspaper is widely cited as evidence (Datafolha/Folha de São Paulo 1995). Like much survey data, however, what respondents understand by “racism” in their answers is far from clear. In my ethnographic work, I heard racismo frequently used explicitly to mean discrimination against people based on region within Brazil or social class. 18. This is pure speculation on my part. I would note, on the other hand, that 25

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

one of the examples frequently adduced to demonstrate the insidiousness of Brazilian prejudice is the fact that legal cases based on racism never go anywhere. This would call into question the real value of such a strategy. 19. See Peria 2004 and Telles 2004 (chap. 3) for a detailed history and political analysis of this policy shift. It should be noted that advocates proceeded without the support of some of the key organizations in the black movement and that the political lines drawn in this battle are confusing and sometimes surprising. 20. See, for example, Winant 1992 and Bonilla-Silva 1999. In Bonilla-Silva’s “Reply to Loveman,” he states: I believe that the sources she cites do not support her claim. Wagley . . . represents the old and mythical view of Brazil as a “racial democracy.” He, Pierson . . . and Harris . . . were the first American social scientists to broadcast the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy. . . . This interpretation, however, has been largely superseded since the 1970s. (1999, 900)

“Racial democracy” is really a cluster of different empirical and normative claims about Brazilian history and society that have been articulated together far less frequently than one would guess from the term’s all-too-common

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

use as a cudgel, as in the rhetorical move above. All three victims here, of course, pointed out Brazil’s already gaping social inequalities. For the sin of underestimating or downplaying the existence of color prejudice, their empirical data is simply ignored with shocking nonchalance. Wagley is further pilloried by Bonilla-Silva in a footnote worth quoting in its entirety: Despite Wagley’s . . . notable theoretical contributions (e.g., his notion of “social race”) and historical contributions, he accepted not only the notion of racial democracy but also the white supremacist view of the Brazilian elite. For instance, in An Introduction to Brazil . . . he describes Brazil in typical Latin American style as a “‘cultural mosaic’ of Lusitanian, American Indian, and African elements” (p. 9). He concludes, however, that “Brazil is made up of three races and its culture is derived from three continents, but its major institutions, its language, and its basic ideal patterns of behavior are 26

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

European ones, modified and developed in the New World environment” (pp. 23–24). (1999, 900n2)

Since one of the claims of black-movement activists has been that traces of blackness and Africanness have been excluded from mainstream Brazilian society and that elite hegemony has gained the capitulation of the brown masses in this exclusion, one would think Wagley’s description is a rather accurate one. Apparently for merely pointing out the results of Lusitanian hegemony, Wagley is thrown onto the pyre of unreconstructed racial democrats. 21. For those readers who missed the “p.c.” debates of the 1990s, the term “political correctness” started as a left/liberal rib at overly formulaic applications of political philosophies to personal lives, as in the “politically correct” choice at the supermarket. The term, at least in my memory of its use, also teasingly warned against unreflective orthodoxies. Starting with reactions to campus speech codes in the early 1990s, conservatives twisted it into a pejorative term for any argument aligned with what, in the emerging “culture wars,” they believed was the “liberal elite” consensus in academia. So I was surprised and puzzled, during periods of residence in Brazil in the late 1990s, to hear the term, either in English or literally ren-

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

dered in academic circles into the opaque Portuguese phrase politicamente correto, used to criticize the entry of affirmative-action quota talk into the political scene. (A Google search now turns up dozens of scholarly and journalistic documents from Brazil with the phrase.) I am still not totally confident that I understand all the connotations of this imported term, but I think it reflects in part a Brazilian perception that we in the United States are obsessively and coercively always talking about race. This is a mistaken impression, but it also incisively points to the ethical anxiety that seems to lurk behind the way Brazilianist scholars in the United States cling to the concept and associated terminologies of “race”: if we reject race, we will be seen as denying the seriousness and depth of Brazilian social prejudices and discrimination. As I know firsthand, one cannot stress the extent of social inequality in Brazil enough to placate those who, at conferences and symposia, lash out with just these accusations at those 27

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

who argue against the irreducible reality and political priority of “race.” “Political correctness” does not seem such a bad term for this reaction.

references Baker, Lee. 1998. From savage to negro: Anthropology and the construction of race, 1896–1954. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 1999. Reply to Loveman: The essential social fact of race. American Sociological Review 64 (6): 899–906. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1999. On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture & Society 16 (1): 41–58. Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. Beyond “identity.” Theory and Society 29:1–47. Burdick, John. 1995. Brazil’s black consciousness movement. In Fighting for the soul of Brazil, ed. Kevin Danaher and Michael Shellenberger, 176–83. New York: Monthly Review Press. ———. 1998. Blessed Anastácia: Women, race, and popular Christianity in Brazil. New York: Routledge. Cole, Sally. 2003. Ruth Landes: A life in anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Cunha, Olívia Gomes da. Forthcoming. Gaining intimacy: The Brazilian racial landscape and national imagination in the U.S. South, 1937–1945. In Culture and theories of the Americas: A reader, ed. George Yudice. New York: Blackwell. Datafolha/Folha de São Paulo. 1995. Racismo cordial: A mais completa análise sobre o preconceito de cor no Brasil. São Paulo: Editora Ática. Durkheim, Émile. [1895] 1982. What is a social fact? In Rules of sociological method and selected texts on sociology and its method, 50–59. New York: Free Press. Fish, Jeffrey. 2005. Mixed blood. In Conformity and conflict: Readings in cultural anthropology, 249–59. 12th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon. French, John D. 2000. The missteps of anti-imperialist reason: Bourdieu, Wacquant and Hanchard’s Orpheus and power. Theory, Culture & Society 17 (1): 107–28. 28

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

Freyre, Gilberto. [1933] 1986a. The masters and the slaves: A study in the development of Brazilian civilization. 2nd English ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. [1936] 1986b. The mansions and the shanties: The making of modern Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fry, Peter. 1991. Politicamente correto num lugar, incorreto noutro? (Relações raciais no Brasil, nos eua, em Moçambique e no Zimbábue). Estudos AfroAsiáticos 21:167–77. ———. 1994. O que a Cinderela negra tem a dizer sobre a “política racial” no Brasil. Revista da usp 28:122–35. ———. 1995. Why Brazil is different. Times Literary Supplement, December 8. ———. 2000. Politics, nationality, and the meanings of “race” in Brazil. Daedalus 129 (2): 83–118. Geertz, Clifford. 1974. “From the native’s point of view”: On the nature of anthropological understanding. Bulletin of the American Academy of Sciences 28:27–45. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Goldberg, David Theo. 2002. The racial state. Malden ma: Blackwell.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Goldstein, Donna. 1999. “Interracial” sex and racial democracy in Brazil: Twin concepts? American Anthropologist 101 (3): 563–78. Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo. 2001a. The misadventures of nonracialism in Brazil. In Beyond racism: Race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States, ed. Charles V. Hamilton, et al., 157–86. Boulder co: Lynne Reinner. ———. 2001b. Racial inequalities, black protest and public policies in Brazil. Paper presented at the “Racism and Public Policy” conference, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Durban, South Africa. ———. n.d. Comentários à correspondência entre Melville Kerskovits e Arthur Ramos (1935–1941). http://www.fflch.usp.br/sociologia/asag/ (accessed April 14, 2007). Hamilton, Charles V., et al., eds. 2001. Beyond racism: Race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Boulder co: Lynne Reinner. 29

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

Hanchard, Michael George. 1994a. Black Cinderella? Race and the public sphere in Brazil. Public Culture 7:165–85. ———. 1994b. Orpheus and power: The movimento negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945–1988. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. ———. 2003. Acts of misrecognition: Transnational black politics, anti-imperialism and the ethnocentrism of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant. Theory, Culture & Society 20 (4): 5–29. Harris, Marvin. 1964. Patterns of race in the Americas. New York: Walker. ———. 1970. Referential ambiguity. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26:1–14. Hoetink, Harry. 1971. Caribbean race relations: A study of two variants. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1973. Slavery and race relations in the Americas. New York: Harper and Row. Hutchinson, Harry. 1957. Village and plantation life in northeastern Brazil. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (ibge). 1980. Resultados da apuração do boletim especial 1.02 da pnad/76. Rio de Janeiro: ibge. Jenkins, Richard. 2004. Social identity. London: Routledge. Lovell, Peggy A., and Jeffrey Dwyer. 1988. The cost of being nonwhite in Brazil. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Sociology and Social Research 72:136–42. Maggie, Yvonne, and Peter Fry. 2002. O debate que não houve: A reserva de vagas para negros nas universidades brasileiras Enfoques. http://www.enfoques.ifcs .ufrj.br/dezembro02/04.html (accessed December 12, 2008). Maio, Marcos Chor. 2001. unesco and the study of race relations in Brazil: Regional or national issue? Latin American Research Review 36 (2): 118–36. Marks, Jonathan. 1995. Human biodiversity: Genes, race, and history. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. ———. 2002. What it means to be 98% chimpanzee: Apes, people, and their genes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making race and nation: A comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayr, Ernst. 1982. The growth of biological thought: Diversity, evolution, and inheritance. Cambridge ma: Belknap/Harvard University Press. 30

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

McCallum, Cecila. 2005. Racialized bodies, naturalized classes: Moving through the city of Salvador da Bahia. American Ethnologist 32 (1): 100–117. Memmi, Albert. 2000. Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, Michael. 1985. Blacks and the abertura democrática. In Race, class, and power in Brazil, ed. Pierre-Michel Fontaine, 95–119. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California. Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of citizenship: Race and the census in modern politics. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press. Nogueira, Oracy. [1954] 1985. Tanto preto quanto branco: Preconceito racial de marca e preconceito racial de origem. São Paulo: Queiroz. Norvell, John M. 2001. Race mixture and the meaning of Brazil: Race, class, and nation in the zona sul of Rio de Janeiro. PhD diss., Dept. of Anthropology, Cornell University. Ann Arbor mi: University Microfilms. ———. n.d. “Race” and indexicality in Brazil. ms. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Peria, Michelle. 2004. Ação afirmativa: Um estudo sobre a reserva de vagas para negros nas universidades públicas brasileiras; O caso do estado do Rio de Janeiro. Masters thesis, Museu Nacional, ufrj. Sansone, Livio. 2003. Blackness without ethnicity: Constructing race in Brazil. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sarich, Vincent, and Frank Miele. 2004. Race: The reality of human differences. Boulder co: Westview. Sartre, Jean-Paul. [1948] 1988. Black Orpheus. In “What is literature?” and other essays, 289–330. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Sheriff, Robin E. 2001. Dreaming equality: Color, race, and racism in urban Brazil. New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2003. Embracing race: Deconstructing mestiçagem in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8 (1): 86–115. Silva, Nelson do Valle. 1981. Cor e processo de realização sócio-econômica. Dados—Revista de Ciências Sociais 24 (3): 391–409. ———. 1985. The costs of not being white. In Race, class, and power in Brazil, ed. Pierre-Michel Fontaine, 42–55. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California. 31

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

racing across borders in the americas

Skidmore, Thomas E. 1985. Race and class in Brazil: Historical perspectives. In Race, class, and power in Brazil, ed. Pierre-Michel Fontaine, 1–24. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California. Smedley, Audrey. 1999. Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a world view. 2nd ed. Boulder co: Westview. Sollors, Werner. 1978. “Ethnicity” as a “key word”: Notes toward a definition. Newsletter of the Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures, n.s., 2 (1): 1–6. Spivak, Gayatri. 1996a. More on power/knowledge. In The Spivak reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, 141–74. New York: Routledge. ———. 1996b. Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In The Spivak reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, 203–36. New York: Routledge. Sweet, James H. 1997. The Iberian roots of American racist thought. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1): 143–66. Tannebaum, Frank. 1946. Slave and citizen. New York: Vintage. Telles, Edward E. 1993. Racial segregation and urban crisis. Paper presented at the “Globalization, Fragmentation and Urban Reform: The Future of Brazilian Cities in the Crisis” conference, Itamontes, Minas Gerais.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

———. 2002. Racial ambiguity among the Brazilian population. Ethnic and Racial Studies 25 (3): 415–41. ———. 2003. U.S. foundations and racial reasoning in Brazil. Theory, Culture & Society 20 (4): 31–47. ———. 2004. Race in another America. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Telles, Edward E., and Nelson Lim. 1998. Does it matter who answers the race question? Racial classification and income inequality in Brazil. Demography 35 (4): 465–74. Telles, Edward E., and Stanley Bailey. 2002. Políticas anti-racistas e opinião pública: Comparações com os Estados Unidos. Opinião Pública 8 (1): 30–39. Thomas, W. I. 1923. The unadjusted girl. Boston: Little Brown. Twine, France Winddance. 1997. Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press. 32

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

john m. norvell

Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 1997. For an analytic of racial domination. Political Power and Social Theory 11:221–34. Wagley, Charles. 1952. Race relations in an Amazon community. In Race and Class in Rural Brazil, ed. Charles Wagley, 116–41. Paris: unesco. Warren, Jonathan W. 2001. Racial revolutions: Antiracism and Indian resurgence in Brazil. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Williams, Vernon J., Jr. 1996. Rethinking race: Franz Boas and his contemporaries. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Winant, Howard. 1992. Rethinking race in Brazil. Journal of Latin American Studies 24:173–92. Wood, Charles, and José Alberto Magno de Carvalho. 1988. The demography of

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

inequality in Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

33

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

2. The Politics of Knowledge and Identity and the Poetics of Political Economy The Truth Value of Dividing Bridges

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

linda j. seligmann Anthropologists understand well the challenge of confronting dissonant experiences; the uneven impact of policies, politics, and economies in specific locales informed by the underpinnings borne of history and cultural praxis; and the reach of power into the practices of everyday life and the nature of institutions. In examining my research experiences in the Andes and a shorter stint of research in a Virginia suburb, I ask whether what we have in common and could be construed as constructive comity can serve as grounds for peacemaking, or whether we are forever doomed to write about hegemony and the different ways it might be understood, contested, or challenged. Anthropologists and the people with whom they work need to consider the consequences of the inevitable interaction between ethnography and policy. The shifting common ground that constitutes identity building and assertion for purposes of self-, collective, or some other interest within the reach of global capital, military expansion, and imperialism, and the speed of Internet communications does not preclude the simultaneous alternative and much slower rhythm of everyday concerns from coexisting. This simultaneity creates flexible, yet somewhat indefinable, spaces within which commonalities and comity reflected in juridical practices and the everyday behavior of civil society may emerge. This theoretical messiness is the mirror of the harsh precision of manipulation, propaganda, and militarization that awaits us in this decade. Given these conditions, what is my goal or “our” goal as

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

linda j. seligmann

anthropologists? To whom are we responsible and for what reason(s)? For the last decade or so, I’ve had the opportunity to move between sites, so to speak, viewing my university and its relentless alteration by the survival requirements of late capitalism, whereby the student is the customer, the president the ceo, and the board of visitors akin to a highly politicized board of directors with little oversight. I’ve also moved between the Andean highlands of Peru, to which I’ve returned fairly regularly over a twenty-year period, though my last extended research trip was in 1998, and a very diverse neighborhood in the greater Washington dc Metropolitan Statistic Area, primarily inhabited by immigrants who speak at least forty different languages. I’ve also gone back and forth in a single day between that neighborhood and the upper-middle-class neighborhood where I live. Finally and most recently, I’ve traversed a widely dispersed “site” consisting of families whose children are adopted from China, Eastern Europe, and the United States, and their respective radiating and intersecting networks, including my own. The same forces that affect my university affect these sites. I wonder, though, about how an anthropologist makes sense of these forces in the light of a specific research agenda. I come to this question because of a growing disaffection with anthropological narratives as I encounter them in ethnographies and in mainstream journals. The narratives have also been making a splashy display at our ritual annual encounters here for a long time now. The crisis in anthropology for me revolves around the way that many narratives in the area of American studies, especially Latin American studies, now seem to be constructed. Whatever takes place within them—and relatively little takes place in many of them these days—they necessitate the bogeyman of hegemony. The people in these narratives, “the subjects,” however blurry and hybrid their identities may be, seem to be acquiescing, resisting, or overwhelmed by hegemonic forces; whether this is the overriding concern of the subjects, it is certainly the anthropologist’s. Remarkably, a sleight of hand takes place whereby whatever power this tsunami has, people are resilient, capable of achieving agency and carving out a degree of space in which they create their own worlds. We learn something about the ways that anthropologists interpret hegemony, but all too rarely do we 35

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the politics of knowledge and identity

get a gritty sense of people’s everyday lives. There are, of course, exceptions to this portrayal, but especially in Americanist venues, there are few of them. While the hallmark of sociocultural anthropological research has been ethnography, both as process and product, and anthropologists continue to write ethnographies, many of them seem to have focused more on the fact, now hammered into us, that people struggle against and within power relations, rather than on the details of how they live their lives, understand them, and articulate them. It is not that power relations should, or can be, ignored. Far from it. But I think we might pursue more assiduously a two-pronged effort to speak to a wide range of publics and to recognize that the ways people organize within or against powerful organizations and institutions may make them far from powerless as well as to feel far from powerless. In a 2003 issue of the Washington Post Magazine, an article by Edgardo Krebs appeared, titled “The Invisible Man.” The blurb began, “From Lima to Washington, the powerful seek Don Nazario’s knowledge. But do they really understand him?” The article discussed Quechua-speaking shamans who have become favored emblems of the exotic that Westerners seek to visit on New Age tourist circuits, longing for something they feel they are missing, as well as for museums that want to demonstrate their attention to living and dynamic displays. Some shamans see this as a moneymaking venture; others, like Don Nazario, as an effort to preserve their culture without misrepresenting it. Especially important to Don Nazario is his conviction that these travels and displays are integral to the critical notions of reciprocity and open-ended learning that underlie many aspects of Quechua culture as well as the vocation, logic, and apprenticeship of being a shaman. But Don Nazario’s experience, when he performed at the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington dc and interacted with a wide range of people in the United States, was that he was left in the dark about things he wanted to know. His expectations of reciprocal exchange were not met. He was more concerned about everyday kinds of processes and the protection of knowledge that is critical for the well-being of people 36

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

linda j. seligmann

in the high Andes—environmental as well as ritual knowledge. He was also unwilling to teach what he knows as a living display at the museum because, as he put it, “I do not run a school and I am not in a sacred space here.” Don Nazario is far from isolated and parochial. He has traveled widely, and he follows international events by radio. Krebs notes, “If you are going to be an Indian in the West, it is best to be a shaman, with his aura of supernatural gifts and powers. It is an aura akin to that of celebrities and entertainers, able to hold and console in some way the angst and spiritual longing of others. But the role also comes with a burden. Don Nazario is often not seen for who he is, his humanity obscured by the thick veil of false perceptions we attach to the words Indian and shaman” (Krebs 2003, 8). In reading about Don Nazario and, in particular, Krebs’s narrative, I found myself gaining greater insight into who Nazario was and the kinds of struggles he encountered from day to day. I also was intrigued by how he sought to imprint his own cultural stamp and integrity on his daily affairs through the way he commented on and evaluated things, and his specific mode of integrating novel and unusual events and encounters into his life knowledge. I learned far more than I usually do from reading anthropological journal articles and ethnographies. I can hear the bynow familiar complaint that, of course, what would I expect, given that one genre is intended for a popular audience, the other for scholarly consumption. But this is the crux of the matter that I think we have come to as anthropologists and social scientists. Has our passion for being public intellectuals vanished entirely? If not, why has it become submerged or disappeared altogether, particularly at a moment when one would expect anthropologists and anthropological knowledge to be in the forefront of making sense of world events? Is it possible for us to “speak to power” but in a language that reaches outward rather than inward? Our social science and area-studies training, despite the hand-wringing over and lip service paid to hegemony, domination, the subaltern, and such, is inextricably dependent on a liberal tradition that “emphasizes the individual, relies on freedom of belief and association, and challenges authority,” as Lisa Anderson notes in a pertinent commentary, “The Global 37

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the politics of knowledge and identity

Reach of American Social Science,” published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2003, 8). Not only does this have an impact on the efficacy or meaningfulness of this training in other domains that may have a quite different tradition; it also contributes to the flatness of what we report in our ethnographies and articles. We seem to have lost track of the value of empirical research precisely when it is critically needed to bring us up short, to cause us to say, “Aha!” because we realize that our assumptions, implicit and explicit, are being called into question. Furthermore, although people’s lives unquestionably are shaped by bureaucratic behemoths and amorphous juridical nets that entrap without saying so, what people do in the face of those gigantic intangibles tells us far more about what is different among traditions, how globalization takes shape and becomes anchored to a kind of specificity that is eye opening and familiar at once. This kind of behavior and reflection is capable of resonating with the lives of those outside the academy, including undergraduate students, as well as with policymakers. Both, for very different reasons, have a pragmatism that we prefer to overlook, reject, or disdain entirely. Michael Buroway, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, “Public Sociologies: Some Preliminary Thoughts” (2003), argues that if we consider our impact as social scientists on heterogeneous publics rather than on a monolithic “public,” we might find our theories, methods, and empirical findings more relevant than we realized, and we might also be able to make our work more relevant. He points out, for example, that our publics include undergraduate students and our local communities, not only the New York Times, although gaining a voice in such a publication might appear to have a more substantial impact than what we can measure in any way over the short term among our students or next-door neighbors. By engaging policy issues and questioning moral values, we energize public debate and focus attention on the impact of institutionalizing particular values and practices of those very organizations we are wont to label hegemonic and leave at that. Buroway proceeds to ask the hard question that one could also ask of anthropology: “How is it possible for public sociology to engage critically with its publics without dictating the good life, without moralizing, 38

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

linda j. seligmann

without privileging certain values?” He suggests that by raising questions of morality, we contest an isolated bureaucratic rationality and a marketefficiency model that give the pretense of being morally neutral or unanchored. By critiquing working concepts of particular values such as “democracy,” we may find that different publics have a variety of notions of democracy at work. These kinds of critiques also illuminate gaps between professed values and practices within a society. Finally, we can encourage publics to pay attention to the consequences of efforts of organizations such as private corporations or government entities to espouse and institutionalize values, bringing some awareness of how those consequences may not correlate well with intentions. I find myself surprised to be calling for a return to a kind of empiricism and “applied” anthropology that have gone out of style over the last fifteen years or so. Obviously, there are some risks in moving toward empirical research again. For one thing, it is much harder to do because of the intervention of violence and surveillance, which have given rise to a far more profound mistrust among all human beings these days. For another, we cannot prevent our research from being swallowed up and spit out in a very different way by policymakers who simply want to rationalize their recipes for pragmatic action by mixing in a good dose of co-optable liberalism. Beth Conklin, in Anthropology News, titled a 2003 article “Speaking Truth to Power,” in which she argues that engaged anthropology is about doing just that. In contributing to a series of articles outlining the complexities of locating truth and untangling crosscutting commitments in the powerladen contexts of indigenous advocacy, she notes that in some instances anthropological principles and theoretical insights coincide with the needs of indigenous advocacy. She suggests that we might begin dealing with such issues by locating points where professional ethics and political effectiveness converge. Conklin’s position is slightly different from mine, but we both suggest that the tables must be turned so that we shift our gaze to what people are doing on the ground, what kinds of skills and insights we have as anthropologists, and how the two converge and diverge in political practices, the narratives we craft, and the ways we publicly engage issues. 39

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the politics of knowledge and identity

In a similar but contrasting fashion—mirrors bouncing off mirrors— Marisol Pérez Lizaur, in her review of the edited volume Elites: Choice, Leadership and Succession in American Anthropologist (2003, 646–47), reminds us how outraged members of the Mexican elite were that anthropologists could portray them in normative terms, worthy of being understood and studied as research subjects, putting them in the same category as the usual groups that anthropologists were supposed to study, indigenous subalterns. At the time when Lizaur and Larissa Lomnitz published their research in 1987, they were harshly criticized by another elite, Mexican anthropologists, who felt that they were squandering a tradition of indigenous advocacy and sympathy by researching a power center. Lizaur calls for the need to study “elite groups in highly differentiated societies, in order to understand the workings of power in society.” From my vantage point, the key phrase is the “workings of power in society.” What is it about our families, the way they interact, the people they know, their standards of etiquette, the stories they tell, the symbols they understand and read meaning into, and the particularities of how they exert power in multiple dimensions that will allow not only anthropologists but the broader society to be engaged by and learn something from this subject matter? At the same time, isn’t it reasonable, as Conklin suggests, for anthropologists to work toward universal human rights and cultural relativism and encourage people to acknowledge the value of those principles within their own society, whether they happen to be elites or indigenous subalterns? This is never a perfect fit, but such an approach enables the relationship between anthropologist and subject to move from abstract theorizing, simple portrayals of the mishmash of hybridity or the dualistic and dueling forces of hegemony and agency, toward the complexity of policy, practice, and activism. My hunch is that this shift away from structural sculpting, on the one hand, and abstract theorizing, on the other, will foster what Fredrik Barth many years ago argued was seriously necessary in anthropological endeavors: “to engage more intimately in the field situation with the ideas of other people, not as exemplars of culture, but for their insights into life. Some anthropologists have been strangely resistant to letting ‘native concepts’ 40

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

linda j. seligmann

illuminate our own understanding and have preferred to merely let it provide the meat of our ‘data.’ We need to practice a greater humility” (1995, 66). Barth was invoked in a fascinating introduction to a special journal issue in Social Analysis (Gershon and Raj 2000) on anthropological understandings and studies of ignorance. The contributors argue that in various ways ignorance has been ignored by anthropologists as a culturally specific and often strategic means that people use for a variety of purposes. The point is that by beginning with the premise that knowledge and the lack thereof are social and culturally specific constructs, the understanding that unfolds is more nuanced, compelling, and even useful than the flatness that seems to result from beginning with the premise that all relationships and actions are power laden. I am not advocating a return to some easier, positivist past that, in fact, had a different kind of engagement with policy issues and a more general public because flat description, implicit assumptions, and overgeneralization substituted for insight, integrity, and interpretation. I am advocating that we bring together our grim appraisal of power and powerlessness to create a deeper, rich portrayal of what happens in between these two poles. It is in the wide space between resistance and agency, between power and powerlessness, that wit, conversational artistry, drudgery, subtlety, and savvy about how to make sense of the ghosts of the past and the looming shadows of hegemony flourish. I would argue that we can do at least three things much better than we now are, using the tools we already have but honing our ability to communicate with them: pay attention to the small processes, big ideas, passionate beliefs, and heterogeneity that emerge daily out of globalization among the people we work with; fight less against the abstract notions of hegemony and more against the substantive consequences of domination that prevent individuals, institutions, and organizations that exist within illiberal traditions from flourishing; and be watchful about how our own predilections for free inquiry may lead us to ignore the battles of long continuity that constitute people’s biographies and life histories, reflected in the minutiae of everyday events and surprises. 41

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the politics of knowledge and identity

references

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Anderson, Lisa. 2003. The global reach of American social science. Chronicle of Higher Education 50 (5): b7. Barth, Fredrik. 1995. Other knowledge and other ways of knowing. Journal of Anthropological Research 51 (1): 65–69. Buroway, Michael. 2003. Public sociologies: Some preliminary thoughts. Presidential address presented at the American Sociological Association, August. Conklin, Beth. 2003. Speaking truth to power. Anthropology News 44 (7): 5. Gershon, Ilana, and Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj. 2000. Introduction: The symbolic capital of ignorance. Social Analysis 44 (2) (November): 3–15. Krebs, Edgardo. 2003. The invisible man. Washington Post Magazine, August 10. Pérez Lisaur, Marisol. 2003. Review of Elites: Choice, leadership and succession, by João De Pina Cabral and Antónia Pedroso de Lima. American Anthropologist 105 (3) (September): 646–48.

42

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

3. Reinventing Archaeological Heritage Critical Science in a North/South Perspective

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

james a. zeidler In a volume dedicated to a rethinking and re-siting of Americanist anthropology, some might wonder why the subdiscipline of archaeology should be included, or at least how it can be meaningfully articulated with an examination of Americanist anthropology. As the lone archaeologist contributing to this collection of essays, I hope to provide answers to these questions and show that, to some extent, Americanist archaeology has followed a similar reexamination of the context in which it is conducted and a similar transformation in the way it produces knowledge. What exactly is “Americanist” archaeology? Simply put, it might be described as the archaeology neatly chronicled in Gordon Willey and Jeremy Sabloff’s influential book, A History of American Archaeology (1993), in which North American–trained archaeologists crisscrossed the hemisphere over the past century in a colonialist enterprise to unearth the true past of indigenous America—the search for a prehistoric “other,” if you will. For many archaeologists whose professional careers have included research and teaching in both the North and the South American continents, the notion of a unified Americanist archaeology seems highly anachronistic and no longer tenable today, even for those of us trained in this academic context. Federal legislation in the United States over the past decade, most notably the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra), has forced archaeology to rethink many of its premises about how it interacts with descendant communities of the

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

reinventing archaeological heritage

archaeological subjects it studies. The worldwide growth of “indigenous rights” movements and the postcolonial critique in general (e.g., Dirlik 1997) have also had a dramatic impact, leading to reaffirmations of the past as an indigenous body of knowledge and a questioning of Western ownership in cultural properties (see, for example, Battiste 2000; Brysk 2000; Mann 2003; Nabokov 2002; Smith 1999; United Nations 1994). As a result many archaeologists have adopted a more critical stance as they realize that in a decolonized world, they are no longer the sole purveyors of knowledge about the past, nor is their scientific version of “the story” necessarily privileged over other possible versions (Bray 2001a; Kehoe 1998; Morse 1994; Patterson 1995; Preucel and Hodder 1996; Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Shackel 2004; Skeates 2000; Thomas 2000; Trigger 1984). For those who embrace a critical-science perspective, older epistemologies of strict scientific objectivity are now in transition. Although this process is flourishing in the United States (see, for example, Derry and Malloy 2003; Dongoske, Alderderfer, and Doehner 2000; Shackel and Chambers 2004), its effects in Latin American archaeological research are not as noticeable, especially among U.S.-trained archaeologists (whether of North American or Latin American descent). How, then, do North American archaeologists situate themselves when conducting research in Latin America? This essay examines archaeology as critical science from the dual and somewhat antithetical perspectives of federally funded archaeological compliance projects (a.k.a. cultural resource management [crm] archaeology) on federal lands throughout the United States, and long-term academically focused research on the coast of Ecuador. It is thus a tale of “crossing borders” for the pursuit of archaeological research. Can the two endeavors be subsumed into a reinvented Americanist approach to archaeological heritage, or should they be defined in some other way? framing the archaeologists’ interaction with the “other”: a personal view As a means of graphically depicting the gradual transformation of Americanist archaeology over the past fifteen years or so, I offer a chart (fig. 1) loosely based on a similar one developed by Regna Darnell (2001, fig. 3) 44

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

nagpra

Increasing Globalization

Heritage Rights Movement

AWOT: the past as oral history

(1) U.S. Descendant Communities

Competing Theoretical Approaches

(3) U.S. Academic Archaeology

Archaeology as Critical Science

Multivocality, Inclusivity, Embodied Objectivity

Heritage Resource Management

(2) U.S. CRM Archaeology

Traditional “Americanist” Archaeology (as objective science)

Multivocalidad Historica

Heritage Rights Movement

AWOT: the past as oral history

(5) L.A. Descendant Communities

L.A. Social Archaeology

(4) L.A. Arch. Communities

Competing Theoretical Approaches

Crossing Borders

Fig. 1. Changing Archaeological Perspectives toward the Context of Archaeological Research and the Prehistoric “Other”

2000s

1990s

1980s

1970s

timeline:

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

reinventing archaeological heritage

in her book Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology. In it she simply and quite elegantly graphs the changing anthropological standpoints toward the “other” as an old anthropology is transformed into a new anthropology. My chart, on the other hand, although somewhat more cluttered, attempts to show how a traditional “Americanist” archaeology, as objective science, has undergone changes in both the United States and Latin America. I begin in the early 1970s since that was when I entered graduate school to study South American archaeology with the late Donald W. Lathrap at the University of Illinois, having previously acquired a bachelor’s degree in North American archaeology under the late Jesse D. Jennings at the University of Utah. Both of these mentors were firmly grounded participants in the “Americanist” archaeology tradition, and at the time, I was a willing disciple. The central axis of the chart shows the bifurcation of Americanist archaeology in the early 1980s into what I term “U.S. crm archaeology” as a sibling of sorts to “U.S. academic (or mainstream) archaeology.” However, crm archaeology goes back a bit farther, perhaps by a decade at least. With the onset of the 1990s and the passage of Public Law 101-601—the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) (see Bray 2001b; Fforde, Hubert, and Turnbill 2002; FineDare 2002; Hubert 1989; McLaughlin 2004; and Mihesuah 2000 for summaries of the reburial issue), Americanist archaeology underwent a dramatic change that was especially felt within the ranks of crm archaeology, and perhaps less so in academically focused archaeology. As Tamara Bray (2001a), Kathleen Fine-Dare (2002), and others have noted, it has forced the archaeological community to engage the “other” through formal consultation with descendant communities.1 In so doing it has shifted “historical authority from the sciences of history and prehistory to a dialogue among anthropologists, scholars, native peoples, museums, federal agencies, and the public at large” (McLaughlin 2004, 185). This was, and still is, a watershed event in Americanist archaeology. As this process of engagement has unfolded, it has generated new legislative measures requiring greater Native American consultation and involvement in heritage issues, and a new spirit of cooperation between Native Americans 46

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

james a. zeidler

and archaeologists (as exemplified by the works in Swidler et al. 1997 and Dongoske, Alderderfer, and Doehner 2000). In other quarters, however, tensions have remained as some in the Native American community continue to express distrust and outright disdain for the archaeological enterprise (see Deloria 1997 and Mann 2003 for recent examples), while some members of the archaeological community continue to assert their right to study Native American human remains irrespective of Native American sentiments, as in the celebrated case of Kennewick Man (Thomas 2000). Where rapprochement has been possible between the two sides, it has spawned a rethinking of archaeology’s colonialist past and a greater willingness to engage Native American descendant communities over more than just the consultation table. As crm archaeologists have begun framing their work within the larger context of global heritage resource management (see, for example, Carman 2002; Shackel and Chambers 2004), Native Americans, as well as other subordinated groups, have begun to have a greater voice in the management and interpretation of their heritage. This is exemplified by the work of Joe Watkins (2001) and Roger Echo-Hawk (1993, 1997, 2000), including the latter’s concept of ancient worlds and oral traditions (awot) in which indigenous oral histories are brought to bear on the archaeological record. As Native Americans have increasingly turned their attention to “heritage rights” issues in the wake of nagpra and increasing globalization, we have seen a development in archaeology, in both the crm and the academic camps, toward greater inclusivity, multivocality, and embodied objectivity (Bray 2001a). This in turn has led a traditional Americanist archaeology to redefine itself, in some circles at least, as a “critical science” (Bray 2001a) in which archaeologists eschew a strict adherence to Western science and its ideal of objectivity and instead situate themselves and their work within a larger context of competing interests in the past. This is not to say that archaeology can no longer tell a good story about the past based on rigorous methodology and hi-tech wizardry, for it clearly can. The point is simply that this is no longer recognized as the only story and in fact may not be of any interest or consequence to Native American descendant communities. At best it 47

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

reinventing archaeological heritage

is a parallel universe to the Indian “way of knowing” the past (Nabokov 2002). At worst it may be viewed as a colonialist intrusion into their past and a “usurpation of Native American voice” (Zimmerman 2001), a humbling experience indeed for the archaeologist. What does all of this mean for the issue of “crossing borders”? To what extent have U.S.-trained archaeologists working in Latin America been affected by nagpra and the “politics of historical authority”? To what extent have they carried this “critical-science” perspective with them as they cross borders to conduct research in Latin America? How do they situate themselves professionally and ethically when working there? I have attempted to graph this issue on the right side of the chart (fig. 1), where “crossing borders” represents a major relational divide. Here the U.S.-trained archaeologist has a dual challenge in terms of his or her professional interaction: one with the Latin American archaeological community (Politis 1999) and one (potentially at least) with the indigenous descendant communities in the country where research is to take place. Both of these communities are quite heterogeneous, and engagement is decidedly situational. Latin American archaeologists work under competing theoretical approaches often derived from U.S. or European sources, and some subscribe to an autochthonous Marxian approach termed Latin American social archaeology (see Politis and Alberti 1999 for representative examples). Indigenous groups in many Latin American countries are still struggling for basic human rights and environmental justice and have not yet turned their attention toward heritage issues to the same degree as their counterparts in the United States. Their influence can also vary geographically, with strong demographic presence and political clout in some areas and none in other areas. This is certainly the case in the two Latin American countries with which I am most familiar, Ecuador and Colombia. Still, indigenous peoples there are keenly interested in their past, and in their version of that past, especially when traditional (and very often Americanist) archaeological reconstructions have served the nationalist interests of a dominant oligarchy (Benavides 2004; Males 1989; Morse 1994; Rappaport 1989). As these indigenous communities have joined forces to create large 48

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

james a. zeidler

political confederations, such as Ecuador’s Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (conaie) and the more recent Pachakutik Nuevo País political movement (Beck and Mijeski 2001; Benavides 2004; Brysk 2000; Selverston-Scher 2001), and have allied themselves with international heritage rights movements, they have begun to have a small but important impact on the practice of archaeology in Latin America in a way that parallels transformations in U.S.-based Americanist archaeology. For example, one of conaie’s demands to the Ecuadorian government during their 1990 protests for a pluri-national mandate was “national legislation and enforcement of strict protection and controlled exploration of archaeological sites under supervision of conaie” (Selverston-Sher 2001, 135). This demand has not been satisfied to date, but it is indicative of indigenous people’s will to extend their political power into the realm of heritage resource management and exert a measure of historical authority over those resources. This trend is far from widespread, however. As one Argentinian archaeologist recently observed with regard to reburial issues in her country, “cultural heritage concerns are probably only going to become preeminent when the most critical needs of indigenous communities have been satisfied” (Endere 2002, 280; see also Fine-Dare, chap. 4 of this volume). Another South American archaeologist has succinctly summarized the current situation: “Indigenous organizations have begun to operate in the sphere of protection, the repatriation of human remains and the recovery of lands. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to them” (Funari 2003, 22; emphasis added). Two notable exceptions to this lack of attention are the works of Colombian archaeologist Cristobal Gnecco (1999a, 1999b) and more recently, Ecuadorian archaeologist O. Hugo Benavides (2004; see also 2001). Both scholars establish the framework for a postcolonial archaeology in their respective countries, one that champions “historical multivocality” and inclusivity of indigenous thought. Interestingly, both authors hold doctoral degrees in anthropology from U.S. universities, and both are quite familiar with Native American heritage rights issues as they have unfolded in the United States over the past fifteen years. 49

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

reinventing archaeological heritage

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

What is curious in this regard is that many U.S.-trained archaeologists working in Latin America have been slow to embrace a “critical-science” perspective, and much Latin American archaeology, whether conducted by North Americans or Latin Americans, still conforms to a traditional Americanist archaeology and the ideal of strict objectivity. Perhaps this is due to the fact that most North American archaeologists working in Latin America have come from the academic side of the Americanist tradition and thus have not been as directly affected by the post-nagpra context of archaeological research in the United States. Perhaps it is simply because heritage rights have not been raised as a political issue in their particular study areas, which is certainly the case in my own study area on the central coast of Ecuador. It is clear, though, that archaeological engagement with heritage rights issues is just a matter of time. Both Tamara Bray (2001a) and Larry Zimmerman (2000, 2001) have argued for a reinvention of North American archaeology as a more democratic enterprise in the wake of nagpra. Such a reinvention will be no less relevant when one is “crossing borders” to conduct Latin American research than it is currently in the United States. In both cases traditional Americanist archaeology will eventually give way to archaeology as a critical science, one in which the development of “alternative histories” is embraced as something positive and desirable. heritage identity and the archaeologist If we accept the utility of a critical-science approach when crossing borders for professional research purposes, we must examine in greater detail how our presence should be sited or positioned with respect to issues far beyond those of our specific research objectives. As Kathleen FineDare and Steven Rubenstein suggest in chapter 12 of this volume, we must “broaden [our] concerns over position, affect, and voice to match the global circumstances in which our work takes its effects, and [we must] all investigate more into the outer circle of the ripples caused by the stones we throw into the sea of knowledge.” For the Latin American archaeologist, this has obvious implications for interaction with indigenous descendant communities in their ongoing power struggles for 50

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

james a. zeidler

minimal human rights advances. It also raises myriad professional and ethical questions about how our activities as professional archaeologists relate to other competing interests and other stakeholders in the pre-Hispanic past, for example, interpretations of the past made by the dominant ideologies of nation-states in their quest to legitimize their hegemony, or those made by commercial dealers and amateur collectors of antiquities as they seek to enhance the dollar value of their “goods” and maximize their profit margin. Archaeologists may often be unwitting pawns in the expropriation of their scientific research findings by stakeholder groups with very different agendas (Benavides 2004). One way to achieve this re-siting and rethinking of the Americanist tradition in archaeology would be to give greater consideration to the heritage identity of the archaeological sites and material culture items that we routinely excavate and study and to indigenous values related to the creation of heritage identity. In a discussion of the effects of globalism on heritage identity, Ian Hodder (1999) has noted that increasing globalism induces an increase in homogenization and in the spread of capitalism and market fragmentation, often resulting in a loss of cultural diversity. However, he also notes that market fragmentation can also stimulate “the search for identity within and against the market” (Hodder 1999, 201; see fig. 2, [a], in this volume), that is, a countervailing tendency for small communities or loosely defined marginal interest groups to form in opposition to global culture and capitalist domination. According to Hodder, these same relationships, or conflicting components, can be translated to the issue of global heritage, in which increasing globalism and cultural homogeneity manifest themselves in the trend toward “world heritage” and the rise of heritage tourism as a leisure industry (fig. 2, [b]). While one outcome of this trend may be a loss of cultural and ethnic diversity, and a homogenized concept of “heritage for everyone,” in some cases it also stimulates a countervailing tendency toward community-based heritage identity. The concept of heritage identity has been productively explored by G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge (Ashworth 1994; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) within a process model of what they term “heritage production.” 51

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

reinventing archaeological heritage

homogeneity

+-

market fragment

world heritage

+-

+-

(a)

identity

+-

leisure industry

+-

+-

community heritage

(b)

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Fig. 2. The Conflicting Components of Globalism and Global Heritage

Ashworth (1994, 16), for example, makes an important distinction between history and heritage: “History is the remembered record of the past; heritage is a contemporary commodity purposefully created to satisfy contemporary consumption.” Thus heritage is by definition usually a contested notion, as multiple stakeholders vie for control of its interpretation. Interpretation here can mean both scientific archaeological or historic interpretation in the strict sense and the more general notion of public interpretation. Ashworth (1994; see also Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) then proposes a conceptual model of this commodification process whereby archaeological resources, historical documents, and our knowledge derived from them are transformed into heritage products for a larger heritage industry (fig. 3). The commodification process begins with the various conservation agencies and related national and international institutions (fig. 3, lower left) that govern, regulate, or otherwise oversee the study and promotion of heritage resources and the dissemination of heritage information. This group would also include academic research institutions and public and private granting agencies from which they derive their research funding. These various agencies are responsible (a) for identifying and evaluating relevant archaeological sites, historic buildings, historic and prehistoric artifacts, historical documents, their associations, and so on (fig. 3, upper 52

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

james a. zeidler

7BMVFT

3FTPVSDFT TJUFTBSUJGBDUT BTTPDJBUJPOT

4FMFDUJPO

"TTFNCMZ JOUFSQSFUBUJPO QBDLBHJOH

$POTFSWBUJPO "HFODJFT

5BSHFUJOH

)FSJUBHF

1SPEVDUT

)FSJUBHF

*OEVTUSJFT

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Fig. 3. A Model of Heritage Production

left); (b) for assigning some sort of relative “significance” to those resources; (c) for placing them within a larger prehistoric or historic context for both academic and public “consumption”; and (d) for affording some measure of protection and conservation of these resources, especially those deemed most significant and representative of local, national, or international heritage. At this point in the process model, the full gamut of possible heritage resources undergoes a process of selection as heritage information is sifted and screened for assembly aimed at particular kinds of consumption through interpretation and packaging (fig. 3, center). Assembly, then, is targeted for particular kinds of heritage products (fig. 3, upper right), all of which feed different aspects of a broadly defined heritage industry (fig. 3, lower right), such as the heritage tourism trade, the dissemination of academic articles for scholarly research, the development of public museum exhibits, private antiquities collectors, and so forth. A critical juncture in this process is the insertion of particular kinds of values into the assembly process (fig. 3, center). These, of course, will differ depending on the purpose of the particular heritage enterprise; as we know, the values of scholarly researchers often do not coincide with those of antiquities traffickers, and neither of whose values may coincide with those expressed by hegemonic ideologies of a nation-state or by indigenous groups and descendant communities. The latter, may in fact, object 53

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

reinventing archaeological heritage

to the way in which scholarly research is carried out, or the fact that it is carried out at all. The point I wish to make here is that academically driven archaeological research can no longer operate in the scholarly vacuum that typifies the Americanist tradition. Archaeologists must also be acutely aware of the myriad cultural, sociopolitical, and commercial contexts and motives that drive the heritage industry in local, regional, national, and international arenas. As Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996; see also Aplin 2002) have noted, the heritage industry is such that we should expect a fair amount of what they term “heritage dissonance,” defined as a discordance or lack of agreement and consistency in how heritage resources are interpreted and managed and hence controlled. Dissonance can rapidly lead to disinheritance, as Tunbridge and Ashworth observe: “The shaping of any heritage product is by definition prone to disinherit non-participating social, ethnic, or regional groups, as their distinctive historical experiences may be discounted, marginalized, distorted, or ignored” (1996, 29). Such disinheritance commonly occurs throughout the world, and in the Western Hemisphere it is indigenous peoples’ historical experiences that are discounted, marginalized, distorted, or ignored in this way. For the specific case of Ecuador, Hugo Benavides (2004) has demonstrated how this process of dissonance and disinheritance has played out over the past four centuries and how indigenous political groups are struggling to reclaim their history and their heritage identity. One way for archaeologists to embrace a critical-science approach and recognize the potential importance of heritage identities that relate to their area of research would be through a consideration of specific “indigenist values” in the heritage production process (fig. 4).2 Basically, this entails a greater accommodation of indigenous thought (i.e., oral histories, traditional indigenous knowledge, etc.) in academic research on archaeological resources, as well as greater attention to indigenist values in the interpretation and packaging of specific heritage products. Thus, beyond writing scholarly articles and monographs for strictly academic consumption, archaeologists should strive to understand indigenist values and heritage identity formation at the local and national levels and collaborate with native peoples on other heritage products that their scholarly 54

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

james a. zeidler

/BUJWF 1SBDUJUJPOFST

*OEJHFOJTU 7BMVFT

3FTPVSDFT TJUFTBSUJGBDUT BTTPDJBUJPOT

4FMFDUJPO

"TTFNCMZ JOUFSQSFUBUJPO QBDLBHJOH

/BUJWF
1FPQMFT PSBM
IJTUPSJFT JOEJHFOPVT
LOPXMFEHF

5BSHFUJOH

)FSJUBHF

1SPEVDUT

)FSJUBHF

*OEVTUSJFT

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Fig. 4. A Model of “Indigenist” Heritage Production

research might inform, that is, products targeted to a wider, more public audience that present indigenist perspectives on the archaeological record. Good examples of such heritage products would be museum displays, educational exhibits, and informational brochures developed in the context of the heritage tourism industry.3 However, academic studies need not be excluded. Depending on the particular situation, these indigenist perspectives may be far reaching in their alternative interpretations of the archaeological record, or they may provide alternative interpretations of limited aspects of the archaeological record. They may also be wholly complementary to standard archaeological interpretation and serve to embellish or enhance our understanding of the prehistoric past. In any case, such collaboration provides an essential voice to those peoples who claim a heritage identity with the resources under study, and archaeology as a critical science should help encourage, rather than obstruct, their participation in the process of heritage production. The foregoing discussion raises an interesting question for archaeology as a critical science and for a reinvented Americanist tradition: How do we 55

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

reinventing archaeological heritage

(or should we) represent someone else’s past, especially when the descendant communities of our archaeological subjects vehemently object to our endeavor, or at best, feel that it is ultimately of no use to them? Assuming that archaeological research is a valid intellectual pursuit, how do we argue on behalf of our narratives? In a postmodern, postcolonial world, the task of the archaeologist should be no different than that of the historian working in a similar global context. Historian Mary Fulbrook in her book Historical Theory addresses this issue: Historical accounts are both potentially infinite in number, and yet at the same time subject to the possibility of disconfirmation. History is both an art and a science (in the loose sense of the latter word). History involves creative leaps of the imagination, but it is at the same time a discipline characterized by collective discourses with a variety of concepts, questions, methods, procedures, and standards of evaluation. And, for all the differences of approach across paradigms, even if we cannot agree on “supra-paradigmatic” or “theory-neutral” criteria for evaluating competing accounts, we can at least attain some clarity about the issues involved in deciding for one approach over another. We are not, in short, left with

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

history as fiction. Nor do we have to buy into a notion of one single historical truth to be able to develop ways of rationally deciding between competing accounts of selected aspects of the past. (Fulbrook 2002, 185)

If we substitute the word “archaeology” for “history” in this passage, we can see that archaeologists possess the tools to evaluate competing accounts of the past and to rationally and successfully argue on behalf of their narratives. But if archaeology is to become a truly critical science, it is essential that it recognize “the creativity of the human imagination; the importance of empathetic understanding of other cultures, other viewpoints; the contemporary situatedness of historical representations; and the inescapability of engagement (whether by action or inaction) as citizens of the present” (Fulbrook 2002, 187–88). This notion is somewhat in line with Bray’s call for an “embodied objectivity” and “situated knowledge” (2001b, following Haraway 1991) in the discipline of archaeology. 56

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

james a. zeidler

This then should be the way forward between the archaeological community and indigenous descendant communities. In the end we must remember that our representations of someone else’s past may, at best, be only “partial histories,” to use Fulbrook’s term. Some will be better than others, but to the extent that they incorporate indigenous thought and interpretation where possible, they may ultimately be of more utility in the present. In a recent summary of ongoing indigenous struggles for human rights in Ecuador, Theodore MacDonald states that “while indigenous peoples most likely will never recover what they lost during five centuries of oppression, colonization, and domination by non-indigenous-led governments, they are now positioning themselves to carry out their right to participate meaningfully in the debate about their future” (2004, 42). It may also be time for them to pursue similar participation in the debate about their past, and when they do, archaeologists would do well to listen. notes 1. One unfortunate aspect of the nagpra legislation was the inclusion of EuroAmerican property law and the anthropological notion of “cultural affiliCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ation” as a means of adjudicating legal claims to human remains (Bray and Grant 1994; King 2002). As King (2002) has noted, a far more appropriate, and far simpler, approach to the reburial issue would have been to recognize the overriding issue of respect for buried human remains, any buried human remains, and begin Native American consultation on that basis only. 2. For a recent summary of indigenism and the international indigenist movement, see Dirlik 1997 and Niezen 2003. I follow Niezen’s use of the term “indigenism” “to describe the international movement that aspires to promote and protect the rights of the world’s ‘first peoples’” (2003, 4). These are indigenous peoples “who share the claim to have survived on their lands through the upheavals of colonialism and corporate exploitation [and who] derive much of their identity from histories of state-sponsored genocide, forced settlement, relocation, political marginalization, and 57

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

reinventing archaeological heritage

formal attempts at cultural destruction” (4–5). This movement has strong roots in Latin America (see, for example, Bonfil 1981; Brysk 2000; Ortiz 1984; Ramos 1998), and its articulation in North America can be found in the work of Churchill (1996) and Ortiz (1984). 3. For in-depth discussion of the social and political complexities involved in heritage tourism, see Ashworth 1994; Baram and Rowan 2004; Boniface and Fowler 1993; Robinson and Boniface 1999; and Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996.

references Aplin, Graeme. 2002. Heritage: Identification, conservation, and management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ashworth, G. J. 1994. From history to heritage—from heritage to identity: In search of concepts and models. In Building a new heritage: Tourism, culture, and identity in the new Europe, ed. G. J. Ashworth and P. J. Larkham, 13–30. London: Routledge. Baram, Uzi, and Yorke Rowan. 2004. Archaeology after nationalism: Globalization and the consumption of the past. In Marketing heritage: Archaeology and the consumption of the past, ed. Y. Rowan and U. Baram, 3–23. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Battiste, Marie, ed. 2000. Reclaiming indigenous voice and vision. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Beck, Scott H., and Kenneth J. Mijeski. 2001. Barricades and ballots: Ecuador’s Indians and the Pachakutik political movement. Ecuadorian Studies/Estudios ecuatorianos 1:1–24. Benavides, O. Hugo. 2001. Returning to the source: Social archaeology as Latin American philosophy. Latin American Antiquity 12 (4): 355–70. ———. 2004. Making Ecuadorian histories: Four centuries of defining power. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1981. Utopia y revolución: El pensamiento político contemporáneo de los Indios en América Latina. México: Editorial Nueva Imagen, S.A. Boniface, Priscilla, and Peter J. Fowler. 1993. Heritage and tourism in “the global village.” London: Routledge. 58

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

james a. zeidler

Bray, Tamara L. 2001a. American archaeologists and Native Americans: A relationship under construction. In The future of the past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and repatriation, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 1–8. New York: Garland. ———, ed. 2001b. The future of the past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and repatriation. New York: Garland. Bray, Tamara L., and Lauryn Guttenplan Grant. 1994. The concept of cultural affiliation and its legal significance in the Larsen Bay repatriation. In Reckoning with the dead: The Larsen Bay repatriation and the Smithsonian Institution, ed. T. L. Bray and T. W. Killion, 153–57. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press. Brysk, Alison. 2000. From tribal village to global village: Indian rights and international relations in Latin America. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press. Carman, John. 2002. Archaeology and heritage: An introduction. London: Continuum. Churchill, Ward. 1996. From a native son: Selected essays on indigenism, 1985–1995. Boston: South End. Darnell, Regna. 2001. Invisible genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1997. Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact. Golden co: Fulcrum. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Derry, Linda, and Maureen Malloy, eds. 2003. Archaeologists and local communities: Partners in exploring the past. Washington dc: Society for American Archaeology. Dirlik, Arif. 1997. The postcolonial aura: Third world criticism in the age of global capitalism. Boulder co: Westview. Dongoske, Kurt E., Mark Alderderfer, and Karen Doehner, eds. 2000. Working together: Native Americans and archaeologists. Washington dc: Society for American Archaeology. Echo-Hawk, Roger C. 1993. Exploring ancient worlds. Society for American Archaeology Bulletin 11 (4): 5–6. ———. 1997. Forging a new ancient history for native America. In Native Americans and archaeologists: Stepping stones to common ground, ed. Nina Swidler, Kurt E. Dongoske, Roger Anyon, and Alan S. Downer, 88–102. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. 59

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

reinventing archaeological heritage

———. 2000. Ancient history in the new world: Integrating oral traditions and the archaeological record in deep time. American Antiquity 652:267–90. Endere, María Luz. 2002. The reburial issue in Argentina: A growing conflict. In The dead and their possessions: Repatriation in principle, policy, and practice, ed. Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert, and Paul Turnbull, 266–83. London: Routledge. Fforde, Cressida, Jane Hubert, and Paul Turnbull, eds. 2002. The dead and their possessions: Repatriation in principle, policy, and practice. London: Routledge. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and nagpra. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fulbrook, Mary. 2002. Historical theory. London: Routledge. Funari, Pedro Paulo A. 2003. Regional report: South America. World Archaeological Bulletin 18 (August–September): 19–24. Gnecco, Cristobal. 1999a. Archaeology and historical multivocality: A reflection from the Colombian multicultural context. In Archaeology in Latin America, ed. Gustavo G. Politis and Benjamin Alberti, 258–70. London: Routledge. ———. 1999b. Multivocalidad histórica: Hacia una cartografia postcolonial de la arqueología. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians, cyborgs, and women, Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ed. D. Haraway, 183–201. New York: Routledge. Hodder, Ian. 1999. The archaeological process: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Hubert, Jane. 1989. A proper place for the dead: A critical review of the “reburial” issue. In Conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, ed. R. Layton, 131–66. London: Routledge. Kehoe, Alice B. 1998. The land of prehistory: A critical history of American archaeology. New York: Routledge. King, Thomas F. 2002. What’s really wrong with nagpra. In Thinking about cultural resource management: Essays from the edge, 103–11. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Macdonald, Theodore. 2004. Ecuador’s past offers direction for the future. Cultural Survival Quarterly 28 (3): 38–42. Males, Antonio. 1989. Past and present of Andean Indian society: The Otavalos. 60

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

james a. zeidler

In Who needs the past? Indigenous values and archaeology, ed. R. Layton, 95– 104. London: Unwin Hyman. Mann, Barbara Alice. 2003. Native Americans, archaeologists, and the mounds. New York: Peter Lang. McLaughlin, Robert H. 2004. nagpra, dialogue, and the politics of historical authority. In Legal perspectives on cultural resources, ed. J. R. Richman and M. P. Forsyth, 185–201. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. 2000. Repatriation reader: Who owns American Indian remains? Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morse, Michael A. 1994. Seeking an ethical balance in archaeological practice in Ecuador. Journal of Anthropological Research 50:169–82. Nabokov, Peter. 2002. A forest of time: American Indian ways of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niezen, Ronald. 2003. The origins of indigenism: Human rights and the politics of identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar. 1984. Indians of the Americas: Human rights and selfdetermination. London: Zed Books. Patterson, Thomas C. 1995. Toward a social history of archaeology in the United States. Fort Worth tx: Harcourt Brace. Politis, Gustavo G. 1999. Introduction—Latin American archaeology: An inCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

side view. In Archaeology in Latin America, ed. Gustavo G. Politis and Benjamin Alberti, 1–13. London: Routledge. Politis, Gustavo G., and Benjamin Alberti, eds. 1999. Archaeology in Latin America. London: Routledge. Preucel, Robert W., and Ian Hodder. 1996. Constructing identities. In Contemporary archaeology in theory: A reader, ed. R. W. Preucel and I. Hodder, 601–14. Oxford: Blackwell. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic politics in Brazil. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rappaport, Joanne. 1989. Geography and historical understanding in indigenous Colombia. In Who needs the past? Indigenous values and archaeology, ed. R. Layton, 84–94. London: Unwin Hyman. Robinson, Mike, and Priscilla Boniface, eds. 1999. Tourism and cultural conflicts. Oxon UK: cabi. 61

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

reinventing archaeological heritage

Schmidt, Peter R., and Thomas C. Patterson. 1995. From constructing to making alternative histories. In Making alternative histories: The practice of archaeology and history in non-Western settings, ed. P. R. Schmidt and T. C. Patterson, 1–24. Santa Fe nm: School of American Research Press. Selverston-Scher, Melina. 2001. Ethnopolitics in Ecuador: Indigenous rights and the strengthening of democracy. Coral Gables fl: North-South Center Press. Shackel, Paul A. 2004. Working with communities: Heritage development and applied archaeology. In Places in mind: Public archaeology as applied anthropology, ed. Paul A. Shackel and Erve Chambers, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Shackel, Paul A., and Erve Chambers, eds. 2004. Places in mind: Public archaeology as applied anthropology. New York: Routledge. Skeates, Robin. 2000. Debating archaeological heritage. London: Gerald Duckworth. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Swidler, Nina, Kurt E. Dongoske, Roger Anyon, and Alan S. Downer, eds. 1997. Native Americans and archaeologists: Stepping stones to common ground. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Thomas, David H. 2000. Skull wars: Kennewick Man, archaeology, and the battle Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

for Native American identity. New York: Basic Books. Trigger, Bruce. 1984. Alternative archaeologies: Nationalist, colonialist, imperialist. Man 19:355–70. Tunbridge, J. E., and G. J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant heritage: The management of the past as a resource in conflict. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. United Nations. 1994. Principles and guidelines for the protection of the heritage of indigenous peoples: United Nations. New York: un Economic and Social Council (unesco). Watkins, Joe. 2001. Indigenous archaeology: American Indian values and scientific practice. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. 1993. A history of American archaeology. 3rd ed. New York: W. H. Freeman. Zimmerman, Larry J. 2000. Regaining our nerve: Ethics, values, and the transformation of archaeology. In Ethics in American archaeology, ed. Mark 62

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

james a. zeidler

J. Lynott and Alison Wylie, 71–77. Rev. 2nd ed. Washington dc: Society for American Archaeology. ———. 2001. Usurping the Native American voice. In The future of the past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and repatriation, ed. Tamara L. Bray, 169–84.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

New York: Garland.

63

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

part two

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

transamerican case studies

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

4. Bodies Unburied, Mummies Displayed Mourning, Museums, and Identity Politics in the Americas

kathleen s. fine-dare The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890

Andean narratives abound with stories of transformation, reversal, and regeneration. The story of Inkarrí predicts that the dismembered head of the last Inca emperor will one day be reunited with its body, thereby reversing the power structure that has kept indigenous peoples oppressed since the conquest. One version recounts that although Inkarrí’s head is held in the coastal capital of Lima, the power seat of his murderers, his power was delegated to the spirits (wamanis) residing in the highland mountain peaks, from which indigenous persons gain their own power today (Arguedas and Pineda 1973). The surge in Native political activism in South America over the past few decades can perhaps be seen as the modern continuation of this prophecy about reconstituting the indigenous body politic (Whitten 2003: 28–31; Whitten, Whitten, and Chango 2003). In North America participants in the revitalization movement known as the Ghost Dance used their bodies to bring back buffalo and lost relatives or to send the spirits of the dead to their final destinations (Kehoe

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

2006; Mooney 1896). Anthropologist Alice Kehoe states that Ghost Dance practices were not eradicated at the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, as the United States government hoped they would be. Rather, they continued well into the twentieth century in Canada; indigenous people in southern Colorado talk about them continuing on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation into the 1950s; and while attending a Sun Dance on the Standing Rock Reservation in 1990, I myself heard a Ghost Dance song recorded originally by James Mooney (Mooney 1896, 1064). Wilson Weasel Tail also knows the Ghost Dance is not over. A Lakota law-school dropout turned poet, Weasel Tail is one of the most powerful characters in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead. At the International Holistic Healers’ Convention in Tucson, Weasel Tail delivers a lecture about the anger the spirits feel at those who did not die fighting the destroyers of the earth. This anger is still alive in the Ghost Dance, he claims, which did not disappear when the ghost shirts failed to repel bullets and European intruders. “The truth is,” Weasel Tail informs the audience, “the Ghost Dance did not end with the murder of Big Foot and one hundred and forty-four Ghost Dance worshipers at Wounded Knee. The Ghost Dance has never ended, it has continued, and the people have never stopped dancing. . . . Throughout the Americas, from Chile to Canada, the people have never stopped dancing; as the living dance, they are joined again with all our ancestors before them, who cry out, who demand justice, and who call the people to take back the Americas!” (Silko 1992, 724). Taking back the Americas is in many ways the theme of this volume, which has as its goal finding ways to make whole a dismembered Americanist anthropology. Recognizing, however, that border-crossing studies run the risk of reinforcing regional, conceptual, and other dualisms, I follow Charles Hale’s suggestion that a strategy of “critical eclecticism” may be a way to frame discussions of identity (or “difference”) politics that avoids oppositions such as class/culture, “Indians/anthros,” or Western/ traditional. The identity binary that interests and troubles me the most is that of essence/existence. It troubles me not only for conceptual reasons but also because it creates problems for me as I engage daily with Native American students and colleagues at my workplace. 68

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

As I have considered my reluctance to speak openly regarding the constructed nature of indigenous (and other) identities, I have come to realize that the commitment to biological essence in particular is so strong that I would say it is the normative lens through which nearly all forms of identity are understood in the United States (see Norvell, chap. 1 of this volume). “Being Indian” is no exception, when it is often said that one is or is not a Native American by virtue of underlying, essential characteristics that are not only unchanging but admit no new membership into the groups in possession of such (groups, many cynics respond, that provide their members more benefits in recent years from revenues accrued from energy contracts and casinos). The recent controversy regarding the struggles of the descendants of black Cherokee freedmen (many of whom speak Cherokee) to retain their membership in the Cherokee nation provides a poignant example of the power of racial models in the political construction of identity (see Daffron 2007 and Sturm 2002). The discourse of identity is not absolute, however; one may in fact be identified as more or less “Indian.” Although this is often expressed in terms of “tradition” and language, many people talk about being onequarter or one-eighth or one-hundredth “Indian,” based on how much “Indian blood” one has. Nonetheless, a sharp divide exists in North America between Native and non-Native persons in terms that allow for little discussion regarding the possibility of “becoming” a Native person if one is not already in possession of this quality. In Latin America, the commitment to the essentialist side of the binary is much less apparent. Although it is absurd to speak in generalities about all peoples south of the Rio Grande, the differences between Iberian colonial and postcolonial governmental modes and those of the English and even the French have resulted in broadly distinct ways of conceiving Indianness across the hemisphere. As Charles Hale (1996), Les Field (2002), and others have remarked, the propensity of Latin American nation-states to build identity on the concept of race mixture (mestizaje) is perhaps the greatest overall difference between North and South politics of culture and identity. Although the relative size of the indigenous populations provides another important variable, the legacy 69

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

of mestizaje in parts of Latin America developed in distinct directions and with some different consequences than did the “melting pot” brand of U.S. assimilationism. Painting the hemisphere with this broad, two-headed brush may be useful on one level, but as Hale points out, it distorts most local realities in a way severe enough to cast doubt on the entire binary. To find a way out of this generalization (both conceptually and politically), we must find ways to acknowledge the commonalities in indigenous movements across the hemisphere without blurring the distinctions and erasing the errors and setbacks. To Hale this means exploring an eclectic theoretical position situated midway between the assertion of a unified and essentially “Indian” subject and a defeatist definition of a hopelessly fragmented and “invented” postmodern Indian. Recognizing that this option may be too eclectic and abstract to be productive, Hale proposes that those pursuing this middle view do so through focused empirical work in specific local contexts (Hale 1996, 39). Rather than look at one particular context, I pursue Hale’s suggestion by examining the issue of repatriation, or the movement to create a new politics of ownership and distribution of indigenous human remains and cultural objects held in museums. Because the repatriation movement is enormous in spatial breadth and time depth, and because it is complex, encompassing a host of local and national laws and international conventions, I narrow my view even further: I examine some responses in both North and South America to the public display of mummified Native Andeans. I suggest that it may help to view the repatriation movement in the Americas as an extension of the various cultural revitalization movements to recover the dead, as doing so raises several important emotional questions: What is the psychic experience of seeing your own dead again when you never had the chance to say good-bye? What does it mean to encounter someone else’s dead, usually in a museum case? What kind of discussions about power, justice, and identity can be conducted in these open museum spaces? (Fairweather 2004, 2). I return to these issues later in the essay. Once it was common in North America to see human remains in American museums, but the opportunity has all but disappeared because of 70

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

indigenous activism and passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra).1 In South America, however, hundreds of human remains have remained or recently been placed on public display well into the twenty-first century. Some of them have even left their museum cases to traverse the world by means of online museum exhibits, televised programs, magazine covers and articles, and traveling exhibits. The public is understandably fascinated by the presence of onceliving, largely intact bodies. Viewers are drawn to their exotic beauty and to their pathos as they contemplate the circumstances of their death, but they are also drawn to the distinct possibility that through the bodies they enter doorways to the past. The lives they lived centuries ago, the foods they ate, the social status and physical health they enjoyed or endured, and the final fate that brought them face to face with museum visitors are of enormous interest to scientists, the nation-state, private enterprise, the inquiring public, and to living persons who believe they have a special connection to them that gives them special authority and rights of disposition. However interesting this topic, I do not embark on the subject of what Andean mummies might have to tell us about their own experiences or times (see Benson and Cook 2001). Rather, I ask what their bodies reveal as political and social fields onto which something of the viewers’ own worlds are reflected and projected. By looking briefly at the discourses and reactions surrounding the controversial display of some mummies, I bring together selected comments from both North and South Americans that reflect shifting and diverse views on identity and cultural politics. I divide the remainder of this discussion into three parts as I reflect on these views. The first part examines two cases of North American encounters with South American Native human remains on display, and at a variety of reactions, justifications, and issues that emerged in various discourses surrounding those encounters. Although there is no general agreement regarding hemispherical differences in opinion regarding the possession and display of Native bodies, there is nonetheless a clear recognition on both sides of the border that the matter is indeed significant and 71

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

controversial. Different national histories vis-à-vis indigenous peoples and different local and even familial experiences may shape different types of responses, but nonetheless the display of dead bodies is a problem. In the second part, I examine more closely some of the differences in the responses to viewing the mummies, particularly as they reflect the politics of identity. These case studies reveal two broad types of problem (or mummy’s curses?) to consider, created in what I identify as a “liminal” or threshold emotional/intellectual/political space where the living and the dead meet. As scientists and museum curators wield nonreciprocal power over Native American bodies for whatever reasons scientific or educational, they find themselves “cursed” by creating a political space they never wanted and now must act within. A second problem that has emerged in the space of repatriation politics is how to define and assert identity in a battlefield that demands the kind of biological proof that has long undergirded the race-based politics of exclusion. There are some broad differences across Anglo and Latin America. While North American Natives have always had to confront the language of universality embodied in the heroic quest of the scientist looking to reconstruct the history of humankind, many South American Natives have had to deal with the language of mestizaje, or the ideology of race mixture, which claims things and bodies Native American as “national patrimony.” In North America the key oppositional figure is the scientist, while in Latin America it is the “nation”-state. Repatriation of cultural objects and human remains has played a much smaller role in Latin American indigenous movements than in their North American counterparts. However, this is slowly changing, which creates a potential danger for indigenous South Americans who may be impelled toward using the language of essence in ways that approximate the “blood” or “race-based” assignations of U.S. indigenous identity as they assert their nationality within states such as Ecuador that recognize cultural pluralism while rejecting plural nationalisms. In spite of the dangers that essentialized identity claims may pose, I suggest tentatively in the third section of this essay that the language of claim and return, echoing as it does that of the Ghost Dance and other 72

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

revitalization movements, points a way toward deeper understandings of Native American philosophies, which themselves may not recognize a binary opposition between essence and existence. The controversial concept of “strategic essentialism” may not be a kind of essentialism—a partial, cynical belief in “tradition” and inner essence only when it serves a purpose (e.g., “performing” Native identity selectively)—but is rather an inherently dialectical concept. In other words, what may seem like a “fake,” situational, half-hearted commitment to basic indigenous essence may in fact reflect a deeper premise: that being and doing, living and performing, thinking and praying, even being and not-being, are dialectically constituted parts of identity that require no choice between essence and construct.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

responses to andean bodies on display Encounters with deceased bodies can generate intense emotions and opinions. Reactions to the traveling Body World exhibits of “plastinated” bodies (Hagens 2006) reveal that emotions surrounding the viewing of dead human bodies whether for education or entertainment are complex and varied.2 The human body is a powerful phenomenon infused with cultural meanings and psychic force. While some regard the experience as marvelous, beautiful, or even spiritually uplifting, others find the practice of displaying human remains disturbingly offensive, partly because all bodies, living and dead, carry the marks of power and violence inflicted by social systems ranging from the family to the state and beyond (Foucault [1977] 2006, 353–54). Although the body on display may be dead, all kinds of social debates and political struggles can take place on its still recognizably human appearance. Although the deceased body is often described as having “crossed over” an earthly boundary into a different realm, the social reality is that a dead person who has been removed from his or her original destination and put on display in a different time and place becomes a potent liminal entity. While liminality refers to a state “betwixt and between” social statuses or other orders of existence, it may also be conceived as lying on, rather than on either side of, various borders. As structural analysis suggests, the 73

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

liminal, undead, third instance provides an experience “good to think” as well as fascinating or disturbing to see. The borders on which the mummy lies mark current and former personhood; group membership in former and current modes of existence; former autonomy (although clearly limited) and current ownership by others; and a host of other domains. Whether removed from their original burial sites to reside in laboratories or put on permanent display, mummies are an anomalous class of “objects,” persons, and symbols not easily dealt with in legal documents, academic discourse, or scientific analysis. The remains of the dead thus form an intriguing locus for examining the complexity of cross-cultural encounters and intercultural possibilities for improving reciprocal and symmetrical exchanges. Their “reanimation” into a new space to serve new purposes and carry new meanings means that displayed mummies are potent “border crossers” (or better, “bordersitters”) that generate endless discussion, debate, and discomfort. Permanently voiceless, they nevertheless articulate—or at least serve as the sounding board for—the views of those whose living disagreements and beliefs are generated by what the dead are thought to represent. They provide not only a condensed locus for looking at exchanges and misunderstandings between peoples of Anglo and Latin America but also a partial basis for the creation of international forums that engender new opportunities for archaeologists, museum curators, and Native peoples to exchange their views and deepen their understandings of one another. In so doing perhaps the “mummy’s curse” that has dogged Europeans for centuries—the idea that body-based knowledge production can lead to dire consequences—can be removed through dialogical processes of knowledge exchange that mitigate the worst of racial essentialisms and cultural fundamentalisms. case 1: the llullaillaco children In 1999 one of the most relevant archaeological findings of recent times took place: three amazingly preserved frozen children belonging to the Inca culture together with dozens of small treasures from the past. This wonderful discovery has been studied and preserved and is now on display at the 74

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

Museum of High Altitude Archaeology of Salta, where it is exhibited to the

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

public to help appreciate and understand a culture that still remains alive.3

The word “mummy” comes from a Persian term meaning asphalt or pitch and is defined as any well-preserved cadaver.4 Although it is common to think of mummies as specially preserved human beings, the term refers to any animal, human or otherwise, whose basic form has suffered minimal decay because of artificial methods (such as eviscerating organs and adding conservational chemicals) or “intentionally natural” means (e.g., covering the body with preservative oils or placing bodies in urns). Mummies are also produced through natural means, such as when bodies dry out in deserts or freeze solid on mountaintops. Although humans have encountered mummies in various ways and places throughout history, only within the past decade have professional archaeologists, often with international funding, organized expeditions specifically to collect frozen bodies located at high altitudes. Approximately twenty-five frozen bodies have been discovered on fourteen high-altitude sites in the Andes: six in Argentina, two in Chile, and six in Peru. According to Christian Vitry (1998), more high-altitude sites have been discovered in the province of Salta in northwestern Argentina than anywhere else in the Andes. Vitry refers to these sites as “sanctuaries” because it has been determined that they were places where Inca and perhaps pre-Inca peoples performed human sacrifices, often of children and young girls. During Incaic times, from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century ad, it appears that the victims were taken great distances on foot from Cuzco to be sacrificed on the highest peaks within the Andean system of sacred geography (Verano 2001). While how the human offerings got to these mountaintops and for what reasons makes fascinating study, the role they played over the years in symbolizing first Spanish colonial and then Latin American national patrimony is as important a part of the story. From their public burning in colonial Cuzco by zealous Spaniards seeking to wipe out religious idolatry and cultural resistance to their mysterious appearance in North American museums during more recent times, the preserved bodies of 75

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

Native South Americans have carried multiple values and interests and have evoked a great deal of desire to see them. Three such preserved persons, now enclosed in temperature-controlled boxes behind glass, form part of a recent controversy that has gone far beyond Salta, Argentina, where they now reside. The first, known as “The Boy,” was about seven years old when he died. “Lightning Girl” shows the clear marks of high-altitude electricity that burned parts of her body and clothing after her death when she was around six years old. Archaeologists found “The Maiden,” who died around age fifteen, resting cross legged with her finely braided hair falling onto her chest. The condition of these children is so extraordinary and their value to both Argentine and world patrimony deemed so important that a facility was built to house, protect, and display them to the public, called the Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (maam, Museum of High Altitude Archaeology).5 After some setbacks, the museum opened in November 2004, and its bilingual (English-Spanish) Web site was officially inaugurated on November 4, 2005.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

How This “Played” in the United States On Thursday, October 6, 2005, a fifty-three-minute Native America Calling (nac) radio program aired that centered on the imminent display of the three preserved children at the maam.6 Controversy surrounding the excavation of the three individuals had been in the news since their removal from the peak in 1999 by a National Geographic team led by Johan Reinhard. The show was scheduled, however, in response to an article that appeared in Argentina’s La Nación on September 13, 2005, that was linked to several indigenous Web sites, including Quechua Network.7 According to the well-circulated article, the museum was planning to celebrate its one-year anniversary by inaugurating the exhibit to display the three children to the public on a permanent basis.8 The program was a bilingual, “border-crossing” event. Hosted by nac managing editor Patty Talahongva (Hopi) with translations provided by Monica Cassells, the radio show featured guests who called in from Argentina and Washington dc. Talahongva opened the program by providing 76

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

background regarding the imminent display of the children in the museum located near the volcano, Mount Llullaillaco, from which they had been removed after more than five centuries. The program guests calling in from Argentina were Christian Vitry, head of the scientific area of the maam and a participant during part of the 1999 expedition to Llullaillaco, and maam museum director Gabriel Miremont. Vitry’s opening words expressed his ambivalence over having to choose between his personal views—which were opposed to the exhibition of the children, regardless of the mandate of most museums to “educate” even as they entertain—and his professional responsibility to preserve and protect the remains. Although no question regarding the manner of death was posed to him, Vitry told the audience that the children were “painlessly” sacrificed in a capacocha (Quechua for “human sacrifice”) ritual, in which, in his view, the victims were probably drugged into unconsciousness, possibly by drinking an alcoholic substance. Radiographic evidence demonstrated that the children had not been subjected to the kind of violence seen in other mummies whose death resulted from blows that fractured their skulls. For some reason Vitry found it important to characterize the manner of death as “quieter and gentler” than they otherwise might appear to the public. Although Talahongva asked why he thought the public had a “right to know” all these details, the question was not translated in such a direct manner to Vitry, who instead focused his response on the enthusiasm of the local communities—indigenous and nonindigenous alike—to have this opportunity to learn more about “their past” from the new museum. Vitry presented a vision of thousands of children who had come to the museum to learn their history and of a museum that had “awakened” much formerly dormant interest in indigenous peoples’ own past. Talahongva prompted the audience to call in by asking, “How are people adjusting to the news of the museum’s opening and the display of the children? What kinds of questions should the international community ask? What are the feelings of Native people worldwide?” After she gave the program’s toll-free number, the first of two calls from the United States came in. 77

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

“Kat,” from Flagstaff, Arizona, denounced the museum as “a horrible idea.” In her words, “Deceased persons must be respected.” Vitry’s response to her was that although many mummies were displayed in Argentina, this practice should be judged on the basis of local rules and realities, not external ones. In Salta, he said, they had taken great care to contact tribal chiefs for consultation, a claim that is also reported on the museum’s Web site but disputed by critics of the museum.9 Talahongva quickly added that one such indigenous critic, Rogelio Guanuco, had been scheduled to participate in the broadcast but had to cancel. She added that Guanuco’s organization, Asociación Indígena de la República Argentina (aira), represents 65 percent of the 868 aboriginal communities in Argentina.10 After a short break, the program turned to Talahongva’s central question, how the display of the Llullaillaco mummies would “play in the United States.” A new guest, Timothy McKeown (program officer with the National nagpra Program of the National Park Service), was asked how he thought what was happening in Argentina “fit with nagpra.” McKeown opened by stating that the nagpra law applied only to the United States and summarized its basic elements for the audience. In response to Talahongva’s next question regarding the existence of any display provisions in the law, McKeown stated that there are none per se, although charging a fee to view remains could be viewed in the United States as a violation of nagpra’s trafficking provisions.11 McKeown responded to Talahongva’s third question regarding whether other countries have similar laws by saying that although some provinces within some nations have passed provisions regarding repatriation, no country as yet has a comprehensive law on the order of nagpra. Talahongva’s next guest was Gabriel Miremont, the director of maam. Like Vitry, Miremont both downplayed the controversy and justified museum policy by claiming that indigenous people were equally divided on the matter. Although he did not explain what he meant by “equally divided,” Miremont added that many people viewed the museum as a sanctuary where they can go to worship the sacred children in an environment safe from the grasp of looters. Miremont’s reply to Talahongva’s question 78

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

regarding how they could ensure that no harm would come to the bodies was that the children now exist in excellent preservation conditions where scientific and religious interests can be addressed simultaneously. When asked about the entry fee, Miremont stated that it should be viewed not as a charge “to see a phenomenon” (the term he used, fenómeno, more closely approaches the idea of the unusual and freakish than does the English counterpart) but as a fee for the upkeep of the entire museum, including all the other exhibits. When the host asked Miremont what he thought of the criticisms levied at the maam by some Buenos Aires museum directors who found its exhibits “morbid,” the maam director became defensive. Rather than address the criticisms directly, he offered this dismissal: “Because any museum is a social institution at the service of its community, any criticisms from outsiders about what it does are inappropriate.” Rather than ask Miremont on what exact “community” the dialectical definition of “outsider” was based, Talahongva took a community-related question from Washington state. “Reggie” asked Miremont if there were any known villages on the Llullaillaco volcano. “No,” Miremont replied to a somewhat differently translated version of the question. “National Geographic took the bodies down as part of a scientific expedition, which necessitated Argentine action.” He explained that under Argentine law (and in contradiction to his previous claim that more narrowly defined insiders and outsiders) the bodies and objects are “public patrimony,” which means they belong to the entire nation (thus implying that they would not in any case have been the property of any villagers on the mountain). When Talahongva asked if the U.S. government could do anything about these National Geographic expeditions, McKeown evaded the question. He spoke instead about the ways that the U.S. government had dealt with the fifty-five inadvertent discoveries involving 186 individuals’ remains found on federal and tribal lands since the year of nagpra’s passage as law. He gave an example of international collaboration that had occurred around the year 2000 when human remains were found in a glacier in the Canadian Yukon. According to McKeown the Canadian and 79

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

U.S. governments worked productively with First Nations and Tlingit peoples of the United States and Canada to properly deal with the remains.12 A final caller added an Andean Native voice to the mix. Julio Guardita Torres, a Salta Native who introduced himself as being of Guaraní and Chiriguano ancestry, said he was in “complete disagreement” with moving the mummies down from the mountain in the first place. “They should be returned by the anthropologists,” he insisted. “They belong where they were first laid to rest.” No one responded directly to Torres at that moment since the program was at its end. Patty Talahongva instead asked for final thoughts from McKeown and Miremont. While McKeown said only that he found the discussion “fascinating,” Miremont’s final words were more heated and seemed directed at Torres: “Don’t blame us,” he said defensively. “We did not move those bodies off the mountain; National Geographic did!”

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

case 2: 1999 protests in florida The comments made by the host of the Native America Calling program and the U.S.-based callers, dealing as they did with another nation and its peoples and centering discussion on a U.S. law against which the actions of other nations and their peoples were judged, attests both to the power of political boundaries and the fragility of cultural boundaries. It is an undeniable fact of these times that issues regarding indigenous peoples are circulating around the globe in unprecedented fashion, abetted by a host of international organizations and the Internet. That many of these issues concern archaeology, museum holdings, and heritage serves to bring cross-border discussions and controversies increasingly into the magisterium of academic anthropology. Articles written by Arjun Appadurai and his colleagues (2001), James Clifford (2004), Steven Rubenstein (chap. 5 of this volume), and others have explored in a variety of interesting ways how the circulation of objects and identities within the framework of global capitalism affect local identities, collaborations, and survival strategies. Another example of a “local” event based on a transnational circulation 80

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

taking on global dimensions is the organized protests to the display of Peruvian human remains in Florida in 1999. From October 25 through April 25 of that year, the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg hosted Empires of Mystery: the Incas, the Andes and Lost Civilizations, a traveling exhibit that featured five “Inca mummies” and three skulls. According to a report released by Yachay Wasi (Quechua: “house of learning”), a Peruvian- and New York–based nongovernmental organization, the press notice issued by the museum announced, “The exhibit opens on October 23, just in time for Halloween.”13 One might easily surmise that visitors looking for a late-October encounter with ghouls were also drawn to the exhibit by the easily accessible flood of information regarding Andean “ice mummies” available in the United States.14 It is also quite possible that a sense of nostalgic loss for exotic Native American consumable experiences drew them in, since American Indian activism and federal laws had removed Native American human bodies from exhibition in U.S. museums. It was even becoming difficult to enjoy “tomahawk chops” or Indian sports mascots or to use the term “squaw” in placenames. Yachay Wasi, which objected to the use of the term “mummy” to describe the frozen individuals put on display, organized what it called the “Inka challenge,” with the following goals: to oppose these exhibits wherever they occur; to denounce any violations of articles of the International Labour Organization convention 169; to call for the internationalization of nagpra; to ask that member governments of the United Nations adopt the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and to provide “immediate protection of the rights of the Inkas to safeguard their religion and sacred and cultural heritage from scientific and commercial exploitation.”15 The Florida chapter of the American Indian Movement (aim) sent its own response to the exhibit, in a widely circulated e-mail message posted on February 16, 1999: Greetings: the Florida International Museum . . . is continuing to display the human remains of eight Inkan indigenous peoples. This kind 81

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

of gross disrespect of human remains is not done to any other peoples. The . . . museum did not even consider showing the human remains of the Romanov family during its “last of the czars” exhibit or the remains of the victims of the Titanic during that exhibit and most likely will not provide the remains of John F. Kennedy during its exhibit of his life. Only indigenous peoples suffer this indignity and gross disrespect of having their ancestors’ human remains and associated funerary related objects displayed like a trophy for all to come leer at. Further such displays are a conscious and conspicuous attack on the sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous nations as museums directly ask the colonial settler state without consulting or asking the permission of the indigenous nation in question. Since the saying goes the only good Indian is a “dead” Indian we must presume the Florida International Museum is encouraging people to pay to leer at some “good” Indians rather than engage in constructive dialogue with some live ones on issues of critical concern to indigenous peoples and to play upon the prurient interests of some people in the dominant society to see dead Indians. There is no educational value to seeing deceased human remains behind safety glass. The simple fact is that the fim is using the remains of Inka people for a ghoulish tourist attraction. Florida aim asks all people to write a letter to Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the museum condemning the display and joining our boycott of tourism in Pinellas County. Thank you.16

The tactics used in this polemic are interesting if disturbing, invested as they are in replacing accurate knowledge about Peruvian realities past and present with assumptions based on the presumed “oneness” of hemispheric Indian persons and their histories. This presumption of knowledge about others deemed “racially” similar is not unique to Florida aim, however, but remains a depressingly common American national characteristic. In this case, the bodies of Peruvian indigenous deceased become an ahistoricized (or inaccurately historicized) political field for creating pan-Indian solidarity. In concluding this section I present one more example of a protest to the subject matter of studying human remains that came from a coalition 82

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

of Latin American Natives who, in 1997, spoke directly to the possible harm that might come to them when North American scholars disseminated information in academic conferences. Rather than attempt to rewrite (or invent) history, as the aim commentators had done, Nilo Cayuqueo (Mapuche), director of the Abya Yala Fund, and Laura Soriano (Mixteca-Zapoteca), director of the South and Meso American Indigenous Information Center, spoke frankly about the political effects of knowledge production. In a letter sent by e-mail to the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington dc, Cayuqueo and Soriano protested the conference “Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru: New Discoveries and Interpretations.” The problem, in their view, was not only the subject matter, which the writers felt could have “repercussions . . . on current Indigenous societies,” but the fact that although they were asked to do so, the organizers of the conference declined to include any speakers who could present indigenous perspectives).17 The proceedings of the conference were published with no mention anywhere in the text regarding the controversy (Benson and Cook 2001). The communications generated from Cayuqueo and Soriano, Yachay Wasi, and aim regarding the study and exhibition of Andean human remains in North America and the Native American Calling program centered on the maam displays in South America provided ways for Americans to speak their minds about the public display of Native human remains and information about pre-Hispanic violence anywhere in the Americas. These were in many ways unusual events, as most of what North Americans know about Native things and peoples in the Southern Hemisphere comes from popular media, including “scientific” documentaries, museum Web sites, and other sources.18 In the next section I look at some ways that politics surrounding the care and treatment of indigenous bodies relate to expressions of identity. who is doing what to whose body (and how long has it been going on?) Shortly before his death the renowned actor John Barrymore appeared in a short documentary film that took a camera crew into his home.19 Barrymore guided viewers through a maze of curios collected from his many 83

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

world travels: a dinosaur tooth given to him by Roy Chapman Andrews; a lump of coal impressed with 12-million-year-old ferns; and the mounted carcasses of birds that had died in Barrymore’s aviary. Near the end of the film, Barrymore pulled aside a set of white curtains to reveal two “shrunken heads” from the “Jívaro tribe” of Ecuador. Mugging in mock horror, Barrymore described how the Jívaro “cut off a man’s head; fill it full of hot sand and . . . well . . . the rest is best not contemplated!” (see Rubenstein, chap. 5 of this volume, for an extended discussion of Shuar—“Jívaro”—shrunken heads). Although some of us would like to think that this kind of entertainment was behind us, of course it is more popular than ever. The shrunken head, the severed scalp, the mummy, the skull’s jaw gaping in a silent scream, or “old bones” bearing the signs of cannibalistic cut marks remain the most popular sites on any tour of objects displayed in celebrities’ homes, on the Internet, in museums, or on tv “edutainment” channels.20 A fascination with the power of bodies and body parts is grounded firmly in a medieval European past, when the boundary between the dead and the living was neither firm nor even insisted upon (Caciola 1996) and the circulation of body parts such as saints’ relics reflected rank and other aspects of identity (Geary 1988). Of course, we need not go back as far as the Middle Ages to view the circulation of dead bodies. From the late 1890s until around 1960, hundreds of postcards circulated around the United States depicting the burned and mutilated bodies of African American victims of lynching murders. As James Allen, Hilton Als, and Leon Litwack demonstrate in their study of lynching photography (2000), some senders documented their presence at the event by drawing an arrow pointing to their own smiling faces in the crowd accompanied by a crude written comment about the victim. Although the Barrymore film clearly had no scientific aims, I find it to differ little from a host of more recent documentary films that take the viewer to the tops of the Andes or to the deserts of Peru to “rescue” human remains and artifacts from looters and take them to laboratories for analysis and to museums for curation. From repeated statements in a Nova special regarding the “unchristian” aspects of human sacrifice in 84

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

the high Andes to an Italian archaeologist’s claim (as he displays a desiccated head to the camera) that he is “reanimating” an ancient civilization, the scientific reveals itself as having near mesmerizing entertainment value (see Discovery Channel 1998, 1999). To some the visual-culture-fueled obsession with the body past or present, disfigured or beautiful, parallels what might be seen as a current analytical shift in the social sciences to human bodies and away from the body politic. This so-called shift sees the body as a text on which we write all significant events and traumas. In this view social analysis merely reflects social desire rather than interrogating it and bemoans the ways that “cultural studies” of texts have overtaken real scientific analysis (see Urla and Terry 1995). These criticisms, however, are inaccurate. The focus on bodies not only far predates any sort of poststructuralist theorizing but also remains at the core of analyzing the rock-bottom effects of colonialism and inequality, whose body-based practices are evident in the early history of anthropology. This history is deeply linked to a nineteenth-century medical profession that practiced its art through robbing graves and performing vivisections on criminals. These medical practices focused on the human body were linked closely to early anthropology, contributing to the lingering impression that anthropologists are little more than physiognomists, phrenologists, eugenicists, and cold warriors looking to save the world and its inhabitants with the elixir of immortality drawn from bodies browner than their own (see Bieder 2000; Hallowell 1960; Hinsley 2000; Stocking 1987).21 This, plus the current interest in forensic work fueled by CSI, Real Autopsy, and other televised dramas, may be why anthropologists also remain a target of the kind of reproach Rosamond made to her doctor husband Lydgate in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch: “I do not think it is a nice profession, dear” ([1871–72] 1956, 335). the mummy’s curse Medical doctors successfully overcame their suspect character in many parts of the world by convincing the public that what they did was in the service of a higher cause. Likewise, justifications and support for 85

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

mummy-collecting expeditions utilize the language of heroic urgency. Invoking moral rather than scientific rationales, archaeologists are said to be in a “race with time” against looters to learn from the bodies what sorts of diseases plagued Native Americans for millennia.22 They believe that their research helps the world understand prehistoric forms of violence, particularly against children. Perhaps most important, they feel they connect living Native peoples to their ancestors via dna analysis of mummy tissue, which encourages the awakening of ethnic consciousness.23 The value of scientific analysis of mummies is illustrated in one of the videos located on the impressive maam Web site.24 The script addresses some of the controversy surrounding the exhibits by presenting the results of dental studies, x-rays, biopsies, and dna and other analyses of the Llullaillaco children. They report what the children ate before they died, how they might have met their deaths, what kinds of health conditions they had when alive, and what status they likely had in their societies (see also Previgliano et al. 2003; Reinhard 2005, 321–22). According to Johan Reinhard, the entire world and especially indigenous peoples benefit substantially from the scientific analysis of mummies. Scientific mummy hunting deters looting and its consequences; international attention provides more resources for protecting cultural resources—”an issue Argentine scientists felt the government did not take seriously enough” (Reinhard 2005, 279); and mummies “increas[e] awareness among people throughout the country about the importance of preserving their cultural heritage” (280). As “true time capsules,” frozen mummies in good condition also offer a potential wealth of information regarding questions about ancient human adaptations, health, and migrations. Mummies rank second in fascination only to dinosaurs, Reinhard claims, with boundless potential for use in educating children. As Argentine archaeologist Gustavo Politis, otherwise critical of Reinhard’s work in the Andes, readily admits, “there are some points in favor” of the high-altitude excavations, including the fact that “the quality and quantity of data that can be obtained from these mummies, given their excellent state of preservation, could be highly significant” (Politis 2001, 101). Politis adds, however, that “none of these . . . points justifies 86

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

the excavation of a place considered by contemporary historically related indigenous people living in the area as a sacred site. Nor is it an excuse for not complying fully with the authorization procedures or carrying out more careful excavations” (101). The unresolved asymmetry between scientific and other forms of authority in these cases is reflected in the fact that not all people—including scientists—agree that the scientific and pedagogical benefits of mummy excavation, analysis, and display outweigh the ethical and moral dilemmas. Some scientists, like Politis, deal with this dilemma analytically, while others, like Reinhard, feel that these concerns represent the true “mummy’s curse”: unfair, mendacious, self-serving, and irrational attacks on science and scientists. These “archaeoparasites,” as he calls those who indulge in the kinds of “mummy politics” of which he disapproves, “exploit the finds without making constructive contributions and without checking facts” (Reinhard 2005, 376n25).25 Many of these criticisms understandably sting Reinhard, as he believes they unfairly accuse him of attempting to steal mummies and avoid Argentine law (see Politis 2001).26 Regardless of the truth of any of these accusations, Reinhard’s position symbolizes something broader, that is, a reason why the Argentine government and indigenous people alike may find U.S. laws such as nagpra and U.S. organizations such as National Geographic to be merely the same old imperialist wolves in somewhat spiffed-up sheep’s clothing. body prospecting The suspicion that medical scientists and anthropologists might still have less than wholesome intentions is expressed in Andean South America, where anthropologists such as Nathan Wachtel (1994) have documented stories regarding vampirelike slaughterers known as ñaqaq or kharisiri. These creatures often have beards and light skin, dress in priest’s clothing, and carry little “machines” or hypodermic needles to suck the fat from their victims for use in bell towers, automobiles, or factories or to make Nivea soap. Wachtel acknowledges that there is more than a little truth to the accusations, as they even apply to him, the anthropologist who mysteriously comes and goes. As discussed above, the stories were 87

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

enhanced not only by the legacy of medieval European tales of the undead (Caciola 1996) but also from centuries of witnessing the collection of human bones, bodies, behaviors, blood, and beauty. In other words, when the belief in the power of the dead and potentially undead bodies—Christian, demonic, and otherwise—was brought into a context where control of bodily power was essential to the waging of empire, new meanings were inscribed on the Indian body both dead and alive. Various aspects of this harvesting, collecting, scrutinizing, and displaying of human body parts are developed by American Indian (Laguna Pueblo) author Leslie Marmon Silko, in the work mentioned at the opening of this essay, Almanac of the Dead, a rich novel recounting five hundred years of every sort of human exploitation of others that culminates under late capitalism in the circulation of body parts, on sale just like everything and everyone else. A review of the work that appeared in the Native American journal Wicazo Sa offered this insight: The parasitic or vampire-like relation of dead capital to living labor (as to living nature) that Marx and Engels describe is recognizable (in different ways) at all levels and in every social, ecological, and spiritual feature of Almanac of the Dead, but it is perhaps most terrifyingly manifest in Bio-

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Material, Inc.27 The company’s founder, Trigg, an entrepreneur and true capitalist, seeks to wring every scrap of value from the bodies of the dispossessed. He literally drains blood from his victims in order to harvest “Biomaterials”—the industry’s “preferred” term for fetal brain material, human kidneys, hearts and lungs, corneas for eye transplants, and human skin for burn victims. (O’Meara 2000, 398)

This and other transactional, environmental, and property transgressions that creatively capitalize on the fluid boundaries between gender, class, and color provide the backdrop for the central plot of the novel, which entails a search for an almanac that will link the peoples of the Americas as they fight the effects of global capitalism. The hemispherical human-remains repatriation movement might be viewed as one aspect of Silko’s vision, as it entails the recirculation of bodies to their homes. As museums work harder to draw customers with 88

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

whatever means possible, and the Discovery Channel, pbs, and the National Geographic Channel attract viewers with an increasing number of programs on mummies and the curiosity surrounding “Anasazi cannibalism,” a global indigenous-rights movement is addressing this possession (particularly in its binary attribute of dispossession) and forming strategies to repatriate bones, bodies, and artifacts. Despite the uneven success of this locally diverse movement, and despite the largely well-grounded claims made by Nicholas Thomas (1994) and others regarding the very different ways that colonialism manifests itself culturally, the repatriation movement seems to be succeeding in drawing attention to indigenous-rights issues by focusing on the essence of social and cultural asymmetry throughout history: Who is doing what to whose body for what reasons? This is the crux of the movement, for bodies are not only sacred possessions and/or responsibilities but also powerful symbols of past and present historical actions. Bones and bodies and artifacts were taken off battlefields in both the United States and Argentina. They were classified largely as “Indian,” that is, “defeated” and “other,” by the state, which used them in scientific and nation-building projects, although in different ways (Fine-Dare 2002). The current movement to regain this property and to reassert control over these symbols faces the fact that the labels were changed in a violent “bait and switch.” To take the objects and remains, one needed only to categorize them in broad terms, again, as belonging to “the defeated other.” To lay claim to these objects now entails specificity difficult to ascertain and that reflects ongoing power asymmetries. These asymmetries take on very different forms in different countries, however, rendering any statements regarding indigenous peoples all being “in the same boat” overly simplistic. In the United States under nagpra, objects and human remains can go to groups (although primary rights go to direct descendants when this can be demonstrated) who have established cultural affiliation under a much wider set of criteria than is the case in Argentina. Nonetheless, demonstration of this affiliation is highly complex, always expensive, and necessarily pits Native peoples against one another in cases of competing claims to poorly documented or large inventories. Its very 89

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

difficulties point to the outmoded and colonialist nature of the ways that identity is defined within the law, ways that have been largely embraced by indigenous people, who recognize that this is the best that can be done for now and will live with it while pushing the boundaries as far as they can (see Todd 2005).

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

nagpra: model for the americas or invidious comparison? Politis characterizes the repatriation situation in South America as “different and relatively backward in comparison with the U.S. and Australia” (2001, 97; see also L. Smith 2004 and Vrdoljak 2006). In Argentina the repatriation situation has moved slowly as the nation struggles with its long-standing reluctance to include indigenous peoples in the formation of its identity. It was international influence (e.g., the ilo Convention 107, 1957) that impelled the nation to form its first council to deal with indigenous matters in 1961 and take the first census of the indigenous population in 1966. After democratic rule replaced the military regime of the 1970s, the Indigenous Policy and Support to Indigenous Communities law was adopted, which led to amendments of the national constitution in 1994 to recognize the “cultural and ethnic pre-existence of the indigenous peoples” (Endere 1999, 2–5). Indigenous peoples were now to be assured of respect, ownership, and control of their lands, and management of their natural resources “and other matters of their interest” (art. 75, clause 17). These “other matters” have been interpreted as including cultural objects and human remains. As McKeown indicated in his Native America Calling interview, however, repatriation and reburial laws have been drawn up for only a few specific cases entailing specific human remains. Unlike what is provided by nagpra, the primary burden on Argentine Natives is to show distinct and specific blood relationship to the items in question via birth and marriage certificates and the like (Endere 1999, 14). Local historians have been active in raising awareness regarding these issues, and some archaeologists have collaborated with Native Argentines in the few successful cases, such as the return of the remains of chief Inakayal (Pehuenche/ Tehuelche) to his descendants in 1994.28 90

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

The symmetrical question: “How have Native peoples across the Western Hemisphere responded to the display of the mummified bodies of Native people?” quickly turns asymmetrical when one asks, rather unfairly and based on little evidence, “Why have South American Natives seemed not to have cared as much as those up North?” Consider how one South American–based on-line archaeology course addresses the matter: “In Latin America the same political process [one that establishes connections between archaeological and contemporary cultures via a law— nagpra—that provides for the return of human remains and cultural goods] has not been repeated. There has been neither a claim to historic patrimony curated by museums, nor the desire to rebury bodies excavated in the past century, but there has been a securing of community power regarding what happens on their lands. The difference between the reactions of North American (excluding Mexico) and South American Indians is notable” (Higueras n.d., translation mine). Alvaro Higueras notes some “exceptional areas” to this generalization and specifically cites the Salta mummy protests in this regard. These protests, downplayed by Reinhard and the museum, are remarkable because of Argentina’s relatively small indigenous population (which makes one wonder if, in fact, they have more in common with the U.S. indigenous scene than with that in the rest of South America) and the fact that political protest has been increasingly criminalized in recent years, particularly for indigenous groups protesting the illegal removal of Native people from their lands. Some particularly violent encounters have occurred in recent years in Salta, which led to a global boycott against sugar produced by a factory that had displaced Salta Natives.29 This indicates that a sufficiently informed account of the ability of Natives to protest freely (and of the matters that they are most pressed to turn their attention) is necessary before statements are made regarding whether “many” or “few” are opposed to a museum’s display of human remains (Svampa and Pandolfi 2004). One can easily find evidence of such protest on the Internet; it would do no harm and perhaps create much good will if Reinhard and his Argentine colleagues addressed these issues.30 91

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

That they are not addressed reflects what some South American archaeologists view as an ongoing imbalance between archaeology and Native peoples. An examination of the differences in various nationalist and colonialist purposes of archaeologists and museums throughout the Americas may illuminate discussion in archaeological circles regarding the differences in repatriation issues in South America. Politis offers a succinct view of these historical influences by suggesting that “the split between archaeologists and indigenous groups has not always been the case in Latin America.” He cites the work of Julio Tello in Peru and Manuel Gamio in Mexico, both of whom “were active supporters of political movements which promoted the recuperation of the dignity and political rights of Latin American indigenous groups” (2001, 103). In Politis’s view, this kind of advocacy has been “diluted” as South American archaeologists have become what he sees as “passive observers” of both indigenous struggles and the “colonial practices [that] still exist in the manner in which some archaeologists from the central, developed countries conduct research in South America” (103). Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to speculate on the reasons this has become the case in many countries, a framework for addressing the matter is provided by James Zeidler in chapter 3 of the present volume. These practices are what maam director Gabriel Miremont must have had in mind when he said it “wasn’t their fault” that the mummies had been brought down the mountain and put in the lap of Argentine scientists. The media-generated heroic attributes have fallen on a North American archaeologist, while the majority of criticism has landed in Argentine laps. These criticisms also include those regarding the “backwardness” of Argentina and other Latin American countries in not formulating their own nagpra laws. (“Your laws focus narrowly on descendants, i.e., on demonstrable blood and civil relationships; our law allows for oral histories, geographical proximity, and other sorts of criteria.”) This invidious comparison of the legal instruments for protecting cultural rights begs the question of the definitions of identity that lie at their core, particularly regarding the concept of race. Many Latin Americans see the suggestion that nagpra should inform their cultural heritage policies and interactions with Native peoples as 92

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

another imperialist imposition from the United States. When, at a session of the Latin American Studies Association meeting of Ecuadorianists in Quito in 2006, I asked a question regarding the status of the original platform statement of conaie (the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) to gain greater control of cultural properties, my query was met with anger from nonindigenous archaeologists, one of whom said that the U.S. nagpra law was “racist” because it dealt with essentialized indigenous people in a paternalistic fashion that only played lip service to their concerns. The curator of the archaeological collection of the Central Bank of Ecuador, Esthelina Quinatoa, spoke to me in the hallway afterward about what I had posed in the session regarding whether the conaie platform statement about indigenous rights to cultural objects and human remains contradicted the Ecuadorian policy of treating pre-Hispanic human remains and objects as “national patrimony.” Quinatoa, who underscores her indigenous Otavalan identity through dress and other markers when interviewed by the press, giving conference papers, or conducting museum business, spoke quietly to me regarding the gap between the early conaie platform statement and the realities of cultural politics in Ecuador today. “It’s not that we don’t want this,” she said. “It’s just that there are too many other things we have to do.” The lack of information about what the South American counterparts to indigenous North Americans might yet “have to do” is reflected in a variety of ways. In an interview conducted for the Danish news daily Information, Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva articulated what he assumed to be the general differences between North and South American Natives by focusing on films made about indigenous life: “When I say that only [North American] Indians can make films about Indians, it’s because we can speak for ourselves. We do not need others to speak for us. This holds true for us, the Hopi nation. The situation is different in South America. There it is important for indigenous peoples to spread their message. As film producers in North America, we are more concerned with our rights. We are fighting for copyrights and not for the right to spread our messages” (Kledal 1996). 93

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

Maseyesva’s suggestion that somehow South American peoples are lagging behind in organizing to achieve their rights is not, however, reflected in the regional reports included in the proceedings of an international conference held over a decade ago, “Visions Abya-Yala: Encounter ’96.” The reports from Latin American nations consistently reflected the following themes: territorial rights, including land titling; agrarian reform law modifications; migration and displacement; indigenous women’s rights; political participation and plurality; human rights; subsoil rights; health; constitutional rights; bilingual educational reform; and environmental and resource protection. The latter topic included logging, oil and other mineral extraction, coca cultivation, dams, military occupation of lands, access to beach fishing, low-flying flights over tribal territories, and land concessions to tourism (Quesenberry 1999; Retamal 1996). In contrast, North American concerns were overwhelmingly those of sovereignty, alcohol, and religion. Consider the following statement issued by the Information Network of Sovereign Peoples/Okanagan Nation, Canada: “Be it . . . resolved that reparations be paid to all indigenous peoples who suffered indignities under colonial powers: physical abuse, emotional deprivation and abuse, mental abuse, deprivation of intellect, and finally the spiritual deprivation and imposition of foreign religions and beliefs, and transgenerational traumas suffered by those indigenous peoples and their survivors who have become dysfunctional in their lives due to suicide, substance abuse and violence” (Retamal 1996, 106). Nevertheless, Masayesva is right in another respect. Despite the activity addressing indigenous rights to repossess human remains and cultural objects at the international level, few states have responded with national legislation that gives teeth to the broader movement. Although pressure from the American Indian repatriation movement (Fine-Dare 2002) and Australian aborigines (Clark 2000; Hubert 1989; L. Smith 2004) has resulted in concrete laws (e.g., the 1984 Federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Protection Act and the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), very little along these lines has appeared in South American countries, as discussed above (see Endere 1999, 2001 regarding the paucity of repatriation legislation in Argentina).31 94

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

Despite objections that discussions of cultural affiliation in the nagpra law are not “about race” (see Owsley and Jantz 2001), it is difficult in the United States for them not to be, when the very definitions of Indianness are based on deeply racialized criteria that are now being put to dna and other tests. As Les Field has discussed, “being Indian” in most areas of Latin America largely does not have to be policed because of the relative fluidity of ethnic categories and the lack of “blood-quantum” methods of measuring membership suitability. Because it is not necessary to establish membership within a tribal group based on “blood,” identity politics take on a different tone, and the meaning of human remains and artifacts housed in museums a different, if overlapping, set of meanings (Field 2002; see Field in this volume, chap. 8). Most North American Natives are heavily invested in these “proofs of inclusion” because to ignore or dismiss them is to risk being stripped of access to desperately needed resources, housing, healthcare, and other historically negotiated prerogatives. Despite the trend in cultural-studies circles to discuss “hybridism,” American Indians have largely not embraced this concept as readily as, in particular, Chicano writers, for whom the idea of race mixture is a source of nationalist identity and pride. Even Leslie Marmon Silko’s magnificent novel of hybridism, Ceremony (1977), is rarely identified as being about such. For Indians race mixture is linked to economic disenfranchisement when blood-quantum criteria are brought into the picture, as well as to connotations of being the negatively stereotyped “hang-around-the-fort” or “apple” mixed-bloods if one manages to truck with life outside the mental or physical reservation. North American Natives have to steer constantly between the Scylla of racial essentialism and the Charybdis of overinsistence on an authenticity that they themselves may not believe but into which they must buy. As Arif Dirlik tersely notes regarding this existential dilemma, A critique of cultural “essentialism” that offers no articulated means to distinguish between the essentialism of indigenous ideology and the essentialism of a Confucian revival or Huntington’s vision of war among civilizations, may be methodologically justifiable; but it is, to say the 95

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

least, morally irresponsible and politically obscene. Indigenous claims to identity are very much tied in with a desperate concern for survival; not in a “metaphorical” but in a very material sense. Indian lands in the United States, or what is left of them, are not just reminders of a bygone colonial past, but are still the objects of state and corporate destruction.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

(Dirlik 1999, 80)

Further, those, including academics, who wish to work in solidarity with North American Natives often find themselves caught in a conundrum when they articulate political or theoretical positions that do not clearly fall on one side or the other of a divide demanded by identity politics. This double bind has also resulted in difficult situations for some Native American students I know who decided to be anthropology majors but found they had difficulty reconciling a divide that demanded they leap back and forth across it in ways damaging to many of their relationships, both personal and professional (see Fine-Dare 2005; Medicine 2001). Most have dealt with this existential dilemma creatively, publicly performing the often-invoked “traditional” aspects of their indigenous identity while simultaneously contesting that designation by the ways they live their lives and pursue their careers. Also, when push comes to shove, “being” a “traditional Indian” rests far more on linguistic than racial criteria in North America. It therefore points to learned knowledge as the basis for belonging, a realization that if carried to its logical conclusion would unravel the biologically based essentialistic biases in claiming indigeneity. The ongoing nature of linguistic training means that “being” is more accurately viewed as “becoming,” which opens the door to belonging in a way that can be threatening as well as liberating. In other words, the powerful racialization of American culture makes deracializing discourse suspect and at times dangerous when race remains the single trump card one has in one’s hand, for better or worse, and especially if one has no mastery of one’s linguistic heritage. One way to avoid relying on race is to perform what has been called “strategic essentialism,” that is, deploying the idea of a biological or spiritual or 96

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

cultural unchanging immanence when politically necessary. These forms of “essentialist” discourse are as real, or more so, than the material ones and focus around the ideas of a spiritual existence that, when disrupted, becomes a human-rights violation if ancestral remains cannot join their living relatives on ancestral land. This type of strategy may be attractive to Latin American indigenous peoples who are looking for stronger arguments to repatriate cultural property in countries that define the body politic as national (Sawyer 2001). Although it is an interesting symmetrical approach, it is also a potentially dangerous one if followed in the same manner that has North American Natives caught in a double bind. taking emotional force seriously Our spirituality is in communion with our ancestors, who accompany us in our daily activities, revitalizing our lives and occupying a special place in our thoughts. . . . Keeping this in mind, we conclude that governments, churches and institutions which relate to indigenous peoples should be requested to respect all expressions of indigenous spirituality and to return all of our appropriated religious artefacts and patrimony.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Lucía Stacey Retamal, Visions Abya Yala Nothing in the world today is more complex, difficult, disputed, divisive, or so highly charged with dynamic energies as the question of “Indianness.” Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages In “Mourning and Melancholia” Sigmund Freud argues that the “normal” condition of mourning—”the reaction to the [conscious] loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, [or] an ideal”—is often mischaracterized as the abnormal state of melancholia, which, unlike mourning, is subjected to medical treatment because its object-loss is “unconscious” (Freud [1915] 1957, 243–45).32 Native American responses to the loss of human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have often been treated as unconscious, 97

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

even irrational forms of melancholia that are manifested in alcoholism, misplaced religiosity regarding nonreligious matters, and other forms of self-destructive behavior. However, if we look at the repatriation movement as a legitimate expression of grief, the positive culmination of centuries of mourning in which constructive actions address the causes of grief, then dismissal of it as a hemispheric pathology becomes impossible. Perhaps we can begin an honest dialogue by considering how deeply bringing back the dead is lodged in the European psyche. The tension between laying someone to rest and bringing him or her back—fully, partially, or metaphorically—for good or ill figures prominently in popular culture and scientific practice. The hundreds of horror films and the popularity of television programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer reveal the roots of ambivalence, horror, and even belief surrounding the undead or the incompletely dead. As Michael Harkin explains in the introduction to an excellent collection of essays about revitalization movements, Christian beliefs about resurrection and its “tradition of chiliastic prophecy” have provided powerful “pre-theoretical models” for revitalization movements for European nationalists and Native Americans alike (2004, xx– xxii). The traditional opposition to cremation practices among Catholics and Mormons, after all, is linked to the belief that the body must remain intact in the grave so it can be resurrected and walk again in a New Age. We also need to talk about the deeper realities regarding the history of acquisition of human remains in terms of the logic of modern state authority. As befits state-based control of bodies (Foucault [1977] 2006), the only ones who can “legitimately” attempt the resurrection of Native bodies are the scientists who keep them in research storage and the museum curators who put them on display. These acts, however, create their own curse, as an out-of-place, improperly treated dead body is a liminal being, neither here nor there, neither alive nor at rest. The scientist and the museum educator therefore also become liminal beings, for through their decisions they take themselves from scientific into public political space, risking being perceived as having changed their moral position from one that seeks truth and educates the public to one that commits sacrilege and continues state-based violence. 98

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

Native peoples are also cursed by this situation, although not in a symmetrical way. The bodies they view, whose displacement and ill-treatment disturb them, were not called up and regained through ritual. Instead, they visit them in their nightmares and stare at them through glass, darkly. To address this situation, the living must step into liminal spaces where their own belief systems, emotions, and identities must be expressed in Western political terms, using the language of racial essence to assert their cultural and historical rights of repossession. Although these liminal, “cursed” spaces may in some ways illustrate Michel Foucault’s claim that no political resistance can ever take place outside power—hardly an optimistic assessment, however nominally true—they may also be spaces where productive negotiation can take place that will induce those with the power to lift the conditions of the curse. The political economy of the dead on display is linked structurally to that of the dead hidden from view in storage museums, under the soils of killing fields, or otherwise alienated from what those who claim affinity or ownership to them believe to be their proper location. This political economy produces anxiety and curiosity that generates income for museums and nations. It also produces conflict and disagreement leading to often-productive social protest and legal changes. One image that comes to mind is that of two people conversing in a museum building. One is speaking from behind the glass; the other is free to leave the building. The glass case and storage cabinets are no mere metaphors, but real equipment, tools, and indices of ongoing, asymmetrical power relations. These power relations, which involve constantly shifting concatenations between gender, race, class, nationality, and a host of other factors, can make indigenous experiences across the hemisphere look very different. A twist of the kaleidoscope, however, can reveal the presumed “differences” to be little more than a smoke screen created by the more economically and militarily powerful northern powers to cover the tracks of history. Much of the power behind indigenous movements North and South is directed not at a “racial” target but at the power of the North and the effects on all peoples of its global economic and environmental policies that destroy lives indiscriminately. 99

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

I will undoubtedly be seen as taking a naive and simplistic position, but some rethinking and repositioning on this matter seems a relatively simple way to facilitate reciprocal knowledge exchange and production. If, for instance, Native Americans express their views on cultural politics as often in poetry, novels, and essays (however “polemical” these may seem at times to some) as in discipline-specific standard “academic” writing, then all forms need to be studied and taken seriously as sources of “data”-based insight and critique. This is not because of an essential difference in the “expressive modalities” of Native Americans, but because the issues so often under academic consideration carry the force of powerful, historically grounded emotions such as grief, rage, and the politics of mourning. If this force is not given serious consideration and is not put on a par with more “reasoned” analyses, then at least two negative consequences ensue. First, the meaning of the concept “reciprocity” is revealed as partial and generated from a position of existing power. Second, the emotional force underlying much of what passes for, or is presented as, “reasoned” discourse remains hidden and invisible (Povinelli 2002). We also must examine more closely the rather crude economic reasons behind certain political stances that are labeled racist. For instance, McKeown’s “distance” from the Argentine issues during the Native America Calling program and Reinhard’s nonparticipation may reveal something other than a necessarily colonialist or superior attitude toward South American repatriation issues. One could read their behavior another way, one that fits within what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the reasoned attitudes of a multiculturally focused “late liberalism.” Although she concentrates on Australia in her book The Cunning of Reason (2002), many aspects of the discussion can apply to the United States as it views itself as a rational world player committed to behaviors and attitudes that will not disrupt that to which it believes the entire world’s people are entitled, free access to the market. Avoiding controversy on a radio program that may have negative consequences for a museum that can bring much-needed tourist income to a floundering Argentine economy may well be a rational way of being involved without meddling in someone else’s metaphorical and very real “business.” 100

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

What is clear from examining repatriation issues across borders is that working with indigenous peoples means not only that we take seriously Native understandings and beliefs about what it means to be Native but that we never fail to look at the what Kirk Dombrowski calls the “larger field of relations and social forces” in which indigeneity is constantly produced and reinforced (2002, 1063). As Dombrowski cautions us, however, based on his work with Native Americans in Alaska who have come under fire by both indigenous and nonindigenous peoples regarding their Christian Pentecostal beliefs and practices, indigeneity should be viewed not as an ontological category alone but as a “political strategy” that is positioned in multiple, sometimes contradictory ways in response to various forces of history and economy. The indigenous novelist and critic Louis Owens also reminds us that most of what constitutes the common notion of being “Indian” was created by a colonialist mentality that perversely wants to claim the positive qualities for its own. Owens asks, “What in the world is going on” when “it takes only the most minute drop of ‘black’ blood to make a person black” but “a preponderance of ‘Indian’ blood—or a government number—to make a person a real Indian”? He speculates that this situation involves “a powerful residue of the old slave-owning sense that it is most economically profitable to label a man or woman black if possible,” while Indian identity is so longed for by non-Indian Americans that any claims to it are “bitterly contested” (1998, 199). He cites the ending of the popular film Dances with Wolves as the “ultimate fantasy” of the colonizer, when the Civil War hero John Dunbar rides east as a “new man, the reborn European,” while the Lakota disappear, apparently doomed, within a snowstorm (123): “The Indian is desired, deeply and with a deadly, erotic earnestness, by Euramerica. What the Euramerican world wants is to capture and empty that space called Indian and reinhabit it, becoming Indian. Only thusly, do they feel in their guts, can European Americans achieve a oneness with the invaded land, the land they are in the process of destroying with a ferocity truly unimaginable. America wants to dance with wolves and find the buffalo, but America has driven both to the precipice of extinction” (198). This insistence that scientists can know more about the Indian than 101

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

the Indian and that observant non-Indians can easily become better Indians than Indians results in many Native Americans being judged as “not Indian enough” by outsiders and insiders alike to claim the bodies, ghosts, and objects of the dead. As Povinelli warns, holding indigenous people to impossible standards of authenticity in terms of behavior, identity, and beliefs represents a new form of colonialism, even if many of them go along with it (see Martins, chap. 9 of this volume). In other words, it is not for non-Indians to decide if a “good” and “true” Indian is one who loves the environment, speaks an indigenous language, and is opposed to the exhibition of human remains (particularly if one’s ancestors worshipped mummies displayed in the public square, as did the Incas). I also suggest, as mentioned at the opening of this essay, that we recognize and critique the Western basis of the concept of “essence” (one apparently adopted by many indigenous people) itself when we enter into discussions like the one above regarding the dangers of essentialism. A Platonic view of matter and mind may not necessarily be the most accurate with which to view a world where being and doing are reflected in the responsibilities of indigenous persons to perform its basic essence “strategically” into existence.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ghost dancers across the rio grande The parallels between the Ghost Dance and repatriation are not specious. Regardless of what some scientists and laypersons believe has been “lost” by the political and legal aspects of the repatriation movement (see Vargas-Cetina 2003), the reality has been that hundreds of thousands of objects and human remains have been dusted off, treated with better care, sprinkled with corn pollen, and even analyzed. Knowledge has been produced, spiritual matters have been addressed, and some of the spirits have been reburied and otherwise laid to rest. If we reconfigure in our minds the idea of “transculturation” (Pratt 1992) to include movement across epistemological as well as geographical and identity borders, Louis Owens’s words about hybridity take on an important element: “Cultures can and indeed cannot do otherwise than come together and deal with one another, not only within the transcultural regions of frontiers 102

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kathleen s. fine-dare

or borders but also within the hybridized individual, [Gerald] Vizenor’s “crossblood,” who internalizes those frontier or border spaces. . . . The Indian has appropriated and occupied the frontier, reimagining it against all odds. A century after Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous pronouncement, the frontier appears to be moving once again, but this time it is a multidirectional zone of resistance” (1998, 40–41). On a final note, I received word that the Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. died as I was writing a final version of this essay. Wanting to consult something he had recently written on matters of identity, I went to a review he published in American Anthropologist (2003) about a book of essays authored by Native scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn that in a variety of ways addresses the question, “who is an Indian?” Deloria responded positively to her work, saying that it is important that Indian writers take up the “hazardous” topics of identity, reconciliation, and precontact violence, which are so often used against them, particularly by turning a sharper critical eye on one another’s work. Deloria was known to many as the man who made “anthro-bashing” an art, but I found no comfort that he had turned his critical eye away from “my tribe” and toward Native writers. I felt only deep regret that I would now not have the chance to meet him when he was scheduled to come to my college and to ask him: “What do you think about the display of human remains in Argentina? Tell me something about mourning the dead I have not yet considered.” notes This essay is dedicated to the memory of my friend and mentor Dr. Beatrice Medicine, who died suddenly at the close of 2006 before most of us had the chance to say good-bye. The epitome of the “transcultural” individual who crossed between Indians and anthros with ease, for she was both, Bea pushed me to rethink my views on everything, from identity to teaching to alcohol to marriage. On the first page of her brave work Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native” (2001), Bea reminds us that in his “manifesto,” Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria states, “This book has been the hardest on those people in whom I place the greatest amount of hope for the future—Congress, anthropologists, and the churches” (Deloria 1969, 275; cited in Medicine 2001, 103

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

3). It is in the spirit of this hope that I have written this essay, which I had intended for Bea to read critically before it went to press. I thank Debra L. Martin for inviting me to write a much earlier version of this piece for an American Anthropological Association Presidential Session (“Dead Bodies and Violent Acts: Reexamining Victims, Perpetrators, and Bystanders”) held in 2001. I also thank Kathy Gaca for drawing my attention to the controversy surrounding the display of Peruvian human remains in Florida; Tammy Bray, Keri Brandt, and Clark Erickson for locating some important research materials; Doug Richardson and Pete McCormick for obtaining information from Salta and Buenos Aires regarding the Llullaillaco exhibits; and Jim Zeidler and an anonymous reviewer for providing good comments on an early draft. Discussions with many of my students over the years have been very important in my thinking through Native identity issues, particularly those with Michael Joseph, Carmelita Topaha, Kristine Harper, Will Tsosie, Corinna Tsinnajinnie, Liza Tsosie, Harrison Ignacio, and Derwin Begay. Byron Dare endured reading various versions of the manuscript and offered sound advice on how to improve it. Steven Rubenstein was especially valuable in helping me focus and refine my thoughts, although any unevenness in the results and any errors are, of course, my own fault. 1. nagpra legislates the creation of inventories of human remains and funerCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ary, sacred, and other culturally important objects held in facilities that have received federal funding at any point in their history. The creation of these inventories must be based on consultation with representatives of any Native Hawaiian, Native Alaskan, or American Indian groups that might possibly have any connection to these items. The inventories must then be submitted to the National Park Service, which posts them publicly in the Federal Register. Native peoples wishing to claim any items listed on these inventories make a request for such, initiating a process involving themselves and the holding institutions. The law does not require—and indeed makes no provisions for—reburial of human remains. The law provides for a review process to address any disputes that may arise. It also addresses a process for dealing with the inadvertent discovery of burials on tribal or federal lands and for the trafficking in protected objects. 2. “Plastination” is a term coined by the anatomist Gunther von Hagens, 104

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

describing a process whereby the body is preserved by replacing fat and water with polymers (http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/plastination/plasti nation_process.html [accessed December 12, 2008]). 3. En 1999, se produjo uno de los descubrimientos arqueológicos más importantes de los últimos tiempos: tres niños congelados, increíblemente conservados, pertenecientes a la cultura Inca, acompañados de decenas de pequeños tesoros del pasado. Este maravilloso hallazgo se encuentra en el Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña, conservado, investigado y presentado al público para ver y entender una cultura que aún hoy permanece viva (http://www.museosargentinos.org.ar/museos/museo.asp?codigo=962 [accessed April 15, 2006]). 4. http://www.museosargentinos.org.ar/museos/museo.asp?codigo=962 htm (accessed April 15, 2006); see also Aufderheide 2002. 5. Carlos F. Pastrana, “Construirán cápsulas para exhibir los ‘Niños de Llullaillaco,’” La Nación Line, November 13, 2005. 6. From their Web site, http://www.nativeamericacalling.org: “Native America Calling is a live call-in program, linking public radio stations, the Internet and listeners together into a thought-provoking national conversation about issues specific to Native communities. Each program engages noted guests and experts with callers throughout the United States and is designed Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

to improve the quality of life for Native Americans. Native America Calling is heard on more than 30 stations in the United States and in Canada by more than 37,000 listeners each week.” Production Company: Koahnic Broadcast Corporation is a Native-operated media center in Anchorage, Alaska. 7. Fernando Halperin, “Controversia por la exhibición en Salta de momias de 500 años: Eran niños sacrificados en un rito inca,” La Nación Line, September 13, 2005, http://www.lanacion.com.ar (accessed December 12, 2008). 8. According to the maam Web site, the children were on exhibit in March 2007. According to the text on the museum Web site, “the visitor may respectfully and silently choose not to see the bodies,” images of which are posted on the site (http://www.maam.org.ar/index.php?lang=2&seccion =expoperm&seccion2=ninos [accessed December 12, 2008]). 9. This begs a question not approached during the program by any of the 105

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

participants regarding whether these organizations, tribal “chiefs,” or any other contemporary Native people have the moral authority to speak for or claim the sacrificial victims. According to North American political logic undergirded by the nagpra repatriation assumptions of affiliation, these representatives would have at least legal authority. 10. aira, said to be the oldest indigenous organization in the country, was founded in 1975 (Halperin, “Controversia por la exhibición”; see also http://www.fortalecer.org.ar/osc_ficha.asp?idorganizacion=1106 [accessed March 17, 2007]). Of Argentina’s 37 million citizens, from 800,000 to 2 million are considered to be indigenous. It is difficult to determine the percentage exactly because of the large number of indigenous persons living in cities and the reluctance of the Argentine government to recognize indigenous groups as “peoples” from fear that it would fragment the nation (Endere 1999, 3). An indigenous law Web site from the University of Buenos Aires, updated in June 2005, lists a total of 1,012,000 Indians in Argentina, divided among approximately 996 communities in eighteen provinces. Eighteen major ethnic groups are listed, including the Kolla, the Guaraní, the Chané, the Chorote, the Toba, and the Wichi peoples of Salta, formed into 160 communities (http://www.indigenas.bioetica.org/base-d .htm [accessed December 12, 2008]). Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Halperin reports a 70 percent representation rate for aira (“Controversia por la exhibición”). 11. Trafficking provisions are found in section 4 of the statute: [104 statute 3052 public law 101-601—November 16, 1990] section 4. illegal trafficking. (a) illegal trafficking. Chapter 53 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new section: 1170. Illegal Trafficking in Native American Human Remains and Cultural Items “(a) Whoever knowingly sells, purchases, uses for profit, or transports for sale or profit, the human remains of a Native American without the right of possession to those remains as provided in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act shall be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 12 months, or both, and in the case of a second or subsequent violation, be fined in accordance with this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both. (b) Whoever knowingly sells, purchases, uses for 106

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

profit, or transports for sale or profit any Native American cultural items obtained in violation of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act shall be fined in accordance with this title, imprisoned not more than one year, or both, and in the case of a second or subsequent violation, be fined in accordance with this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.”

12. See http: // www.nathpo.org / News / NAGPRA / News-NAGPRA3.html (accessed December 12, 2008). 13. M. Samuel and R. Borrero, “Desecration of Indigenous Burial Sites and Display of Indigenous Remains,” www.geocities.com/rainforest/6658/ inkach3.htm (no longer available, but see http://www.yachaywasi-ngo.org/ inkachallenge.htm [accessed December 12, 2008]). 14. A season 2 episode of the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured an Inca mummy vampire named Ampata after the Peruvian peak Ampato, where one of the “ice mummies” was located. The episode description recounts the tragedy that was created by the mummy girl’s museum tour: The Mummy’s Curse: Five hundred years ago, the Incan people sacrificed their princess to the mountain god Sebancaya by burying her alive in a tomb. She is kept from moving by a curse on the seal buried with her (a plate with Incan hieroglyphics on it). Breaking the seal frees her. Inca mummy girl was once human, now she’s a mummified corpse. Although it was said that she Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

was “buried alive for all eternity,” she is, in fact, dead and has been for 500 years. In her natural state, she is a shriveled mummy—a state she can only reverse by draining energy out of the living with a kiss, mummifying them in the process. To continue to move about freely, she has to periodically find new victims. The mummy has been on tour in museums around the country. A guard has accompanied her on her tour to insure that she doesn’t awaken and escape. Somehow, the guard misses Rodney breaking the seal. Theoretically, the mummy could have escaped in any city on her tour if someone had broken the seal. (Liner notes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season, dvd [Twentieth Century Fox, 2002])

For examples of media coverage of the “ice mummies” exhibit, see J. Cort, “Ice Mummies: Frozen in Heaven,” transcript 2516 of a 1998 Nova broadcast, pbs, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2516frozen.html (accessed December 15, 2008); J. M. Deem, “Juanita, Incan Ice Maiden,” 107

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/featured/juanita.htm (accessed December 12, 2008); “500-Year-Old Mummies Found in Andes: Three Sacrificial Victims Believed ‘Best-Preserved’ Incans Ever Found,” Washington Post, April 8, 1999; McIntyre 1973; D. Perlman, “Archeologists Find 500-Year-Old-Inca,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 24, 1995; Reinhard 1998, 1999, 2005; J. N. Wilford, “Move Over, Iceman! New Star from the Andes,” New York Times, October 25, 1995; J. N. Wilford, “Mummy Tells Story of a Sacrifice, Scientists Say,” New York Times, May 22, 1996; J. N. Wilford, “Mummies May Be of Incan Elite, after Conquest of ‘Cloud People,’” New York Times, December 16, 1997; J. N. Wilford, “Entirely Preserved Inca Mummies Found,” New York Times, April 7, 1999. 15. ilo c 169 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989, providing for the “full measure of human rights and fundamental freedoms without hindrance or discrimination” (http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/english/convdisp1.htm [accessed December 12, 2008]). For the declaration of the goals, see Yachay Wasi, “The Inka Challenge,” http://www.yachaywasi-ngo.org/inkachal lenge.htm (accessed December 12, 2008). For a discussion of the reasons the United States has not yet signed off on either the un or the oas draft declarations, see Anaya 1999. 16. aim (American Indian Movement) Florida, “Help Stop the Insanity,” e-mail message received in 1999 via http://[email protected]. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

17. N. Cayuqueo and L. Soriano, letter to the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington dc, September 20, 1997, via e-mail lists [email protected], and [email protected]. 18. See, for example, http://www.nationalgeographic.com; http://www.cha chapoyas.com (accessed December 12, 2008); Pringle 1998. 19. This short documentary aired on the Turner Classic Movie Channel early in this century. 20. For example, http://www.touregypt.net; http://www.mummytombs.com (accessed December 12, 2008). I have not listed far more disturbing sites involving bodies, body parts, and strange forms of violence performed on them. Regarding “edutainment” offerings, see “Monasterios, momias y pisco en Arequipa,” La Nación Line, November 27, 2005; and M. Pollak, “Mummies and More in an Antiquities Roadshow,” New York Times, January 4, 2001. 108

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

21. Roger Smith identifies physiognomy as a kind of “pragmatic anthropology” developed from Kant’s ideas regarding philosophical anthropology. Smith states that Kant defined physiognomy as “the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior” (1997, 211). 22. While in the United States a great deal of attention is given to the question of looting and the market for ancient artifacts and “relics,” there is even more concern in Latin America, where looting is an actual profession upon which whole communities at times thrive (J. Zeidler, pers. comm.). And because it takes place on the coast and in other areas where few Indians live, where poverty and environmental misfortune are prevalent, and where the police are also involved, there seems to be no practical way to stop it. Indian activists in Ecuador and Peru have other things to worry about right now. 23. A discussion of the benefits of scientific research (as weighed against the value of reinterment) in relation to nagpra can be found in Hibbert 1998–99. See also Pringle 1998, 1999; Reuters, “Unraveling a Mummy Mystery: Peruvian Man May Be Genetically Linked to Incan Mummy,” abcnews.com, 1999, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/mummy9912 10.html (no longer available). Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

24. http://www.maam.org.ar (accessed December 12, 2008). 25. Perhaps this is why Reinhard declined to be interviewed (although his employer National Geographic approved the request) by Native America Calling for its program on the results of his activities as a National Geographic explorer. I cannot confirm this; I note, however, that he has dismissed Native American objections to his work and to the museum in the book National Geographic published about his work, The Ice Maiden (2005). Although The Ice Maiden is packed with details about Reinhard’s crews, asthma attacks, and other information related to the expeditions, it says almost nothing about the works published by Argentine academics on issues such as reburial, archaeological patrimony, and colonialism (see Endere 1999, 2001; Politis 2001). Reinhard notes with obvious pride the ways that his mummy excavations have directly resulted in the “revitalization” of indigenous cultures of 109

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

the Andes, a topic not only fascinating and complex but deserving of much more research. I believe, however, that by not looking more deeply at the double edges of these issues and by choosing to use paternalistic language as he describes how his actions led indigenous peoples to “begin to realize” various previously unrecognized aspects of their history, Reinhard misses an important opportunity to be truly scientific, that is, honest, open, and comprehensive regarding the motivations and outcomes of his research. That he reports a Japanese reenactment of the life of the Peruvian “Ice Maiden” with no concern, irony, or analysis into deeper meanings, for instance, means he risks opting for the self-congratulatory rather than filling in the gaps regarding the meanings, the unanticipated consequences, and, above all, the potential ethical problems of his research. 26. On page 338 of Reinhard’s 2005 text he reports that a resolution was passed supporting his research and the treatment of mummies in Salta by the Third World Congress of the Quechua Language, held at the Casa de la Culture in Salta, October 8–10, 2004. Although I found the complete agenda and resolutions passed by the congress on the Web, I could not locate the resolution to which Reinhard referred. That does not mean that such a resolution was not issued. 27. I remember the first time I tried to explain to my stepson the value of savCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ing one’s money in an interest-bearing bank account. He looked at me as if I were crazy for suggesting that his money could “grow” while he wasn’t looking. This reproduction of a “dead” thing at the expense of living beings who work for it, or who would like to spend it right now, was explored by Michael Taussig in his work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1983). According to Taussig, the Christian devil was evoked often in those parts of the Americas where wage labor and the exchange value of capital were introduced. Ambiguously dangerous trickster figures were transformed into or replaced by the unambiguous evil of the devil. 28. In 1884 Inakayal and a member of his family were imprisoned in Buenos Aires when they tried to speak to a military commander regarding the impacts of a fort built on their land. Inakayal eventually went to the Museum of La Plata to live, but he died soon afterward, on September 24, 1888. His bones, brain, and scalp became part of the museum collection, and his 110

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

skeleton was displayed until 1940. He was reburied on April 19, “Day of the Indian.” Politis reports that archaeologists and physical anthropologists were opposed to the law. As with other repatriation cases in Argentina, including that of the Llullaillaco and other mummies, the strong assumption that these remains form national cultural “patrimony” is an emotional issue as well as a legal precedent that overrides local “tribal” claims in asymmetrical fashion (Politis 2001, 98–99; see Endere 1999, 8–12; 2001, 3, 5–7). 29. See http://www.mapuche.info/indgen/pagina12_040311.html (accessed December 12, 2008). 30. On November 22, 2001, I accessed a document that no longer exists on the Web called “Complaint against Defamation of Aboriginal Tombs” (“Denuncia por profanación de tumbas aborigenes,” May 16, 2000). This document came from the caa (Consejo de Acontecimientos Aborígenes de Argentina [Council of Aboriginal Events of Argentina]) Argentina and had been distributed via the French wanadoo site (http://www.perso.wanadoo.fr/ francois.luis.blanc/amerindia/denuncia%20prof %2). The document demanded the respectful and ethical return of the Llullaillaco mummies to their place of origin, as well as those of the Mapuche leader Inakayal. Those of Inakayal were eventually reinterred (see Politis 2001). The “denuncia” Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

was signed on May 16, 2000, by Uxtacio Baez (Kañandary), Fernanda Ortega Villa (Guaraní), and Wenceslao Villanueva (Aymara). More recent protests to the Llullaillaco display can be found in Halperin, “Controversia por la exhibición.” 31. The United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues (unpfii) provides an important opportunity for furthering discussions among all indigenous peoples. The unpfii is an advisory body of ecosoc, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the mandate of which is to “discuss indigenous issues related to economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health and human rights” (http://www.un.org/ esa/socdev/unpfii/ [accessed December 12, 2008]). At the time of this writing, the sixth session was scheduled to take place at the un Headquarters in New York City on May 14–25, 2007. Originally formulated as the un Working Group on Indigenous Populations, unpfii’s status as a subsidiary 111

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

organ of ecosoc causes fear among some that it will relegate indigenous voices to the status of consultants rather than full participants in the un decision-making process. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see to what extent repatriation issues will be on the agenda in the future and what role indigenous representatives from the Americas will play in forwarding that discussion. Currently cultural objects and human remains do not play a very significant role in the documents that have been generated by unpfii, as they are contained within the category of “culture,” one of the six mandated areas of concern of the permanent forum and its Millennium Development Goals (http:// www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/session_sixth.html [accessed December 12, 2008]). 32. I thank Steven Rubenstein for drawing my attention to this essay by Freud and for helping me think through many of the important issues in this essay, particularly the nature of the mummy’s “curse” in relation to archaeologists.

references Allen, James, Hilton Als, and Leon F. Litwack. 2000. Without sanctuary: Lynching photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Anaya, S. J. 1999. Superpower attitudes towards indigenous peoples and group rights. Lecture delivered at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, March 24–27, 1999, Washington dc. Appadurai, Arjun, Ashish Chadha, Ian Hodder, Trinity Jackman, and Chris Witmore. 2001. The globalization of archaeology and heritage: A discussion with Arjun Appadurai. Journal of Social Archaeology 1:35–49. Arguedas, José María, and Josafat Roel Pineda. 1973. Tres versiones del mito de Inkarrí. In Ideología mesiánica del mundo Andino, ed. Juan M. Ossio A. Edición de Ignacio Prado Pastor, 219–36. Lima: Gráfica Morson. Aufderheide, Arthur. 2002. The scientific study of mummies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benson, E. P., and A. G. Cook, eds. 2001. Ritual sacrifice in ancient Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bieder, R. E. 2000. The representation of Indian bodies in nineteenth-century 112

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

American anthropology. In Repatriation reader: Who owns American Indian remains? ed. D. Mihesuah, 19–36. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Caciola, Nancy. 1996. Wraiths, revenants and ritual in medieval culture. Past and Present 152 (August): 3–45. Clark, G. 2000. Address by atsic [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission] to the Eighteenth Session of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, July 27. http://www.atsic.gov/au; now at http:// pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/36031 (accessed December 12, 2008). Clifford, James. 2004. Looking several ways: Anthropology and native heritage in Alaska. Current Anthropology 45 (1) (February): 5–30. Daffron, Brian. 2007. Freedman descendants struggle to maintain their Cherokee identity. Indian Country Today, March 30. http://www.indiancountry today.com/archive/28149654.html (accessed December 12, 2008). Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1969. Custer died for your sins: An Indian manifesto. New York: Macmillan. ———. 2003. Review of Anti-Indianism in modern America: A voice from Tatekeya’s earth, by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. American Anthropologist 105 (3) (September): 643–44. Dirlik, Arif. 1999. The past as legacy and project: Postcolonial criticism in the perspective of indigenous historicism. In Contemporary Native American political issues, ed. Troy R. Johnson, 73–97. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Discovery Channel. 1998. Lost warriors of the clouds. vhs. No. 722058. New York: Engel Brothers Media. (Program on Chachapoya, Peru, burials.) ———. 1999. Peru’s city of ghosts. vhs. No. 738810. New York: Engel Brothers Media. (Program on Nazca, Peru, site of Cahuachi.) Dombrowski, Kirk. 2002. The praxis of indigenism and Alaska native timber politics. American Anthropologist 104 (4) (December): 1062–73. Eliot, George. [1871–72] 1956. Middlemarch. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Endere, María Luz. 1999. Reburial issue in Argentina: A growing conflict. Paper presented at the Collecting, Collections and the Development of the “Reburial Issue” symposium at the Fourth World Archaeological Congress, University of Cape Town, January 10–14. ———. 2001. Patrimonio arqueológico en Argentina: Panorama actual y perspectivas futuras. Revista de Arqueología Americana 20:143–58. 113

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

Fairweather, Ian. 2004. Introduction. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 48 (1) (Spring): 1–4. Field, Les. 2002. Blood and traits: Preliminary observations on the analysis of Mestizo and indigenous identities in Latin America vs. the U.S. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7 (1): 2–33. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and nagpra. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2005. Anthropological suspicion, public interest and nagpra. Journal of Social Archaeology 5 (2): 171–92. Foucault, Michel. [1977] 2006. The body of the condemned. In Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 352–56. London: Penguin Books. Reprinted in Anthropology in theory: Issues in epistemology, ed. Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders. Malden ma: Blackwell. Freud, Sigmund. [1915] 1957. Mourning and melancholia. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, On the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works (1914–1916), ed. and trans. James Strachey, 237–58. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Geary, Patrick. 1988. Sacred commodities: The circulation of medieval relics. In The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun ApCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

padurai, 169–91. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hagens, Gunther von. 2006. Gunther von Hagens’ body worlds: The anatomical exhibition of real human bodies. Foreword by Wilhelm Kriz. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Arts and Sciences. Hale, Charles. 1996. Mestizaje, hybridity, and the cultural politics of difference in post-revolutionary Central America. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (1): 34–61. Hallowell, A. I. 1960. The beginnings of anthropology in America. In The American anthropologist 1888–1920, ed. Frederica de Laguna, 1–90. Evanston il: Row, Peterson. Harkin, Michael E. 2004. Introduction: Revitalization as history and theory. In Reassessing revitalization movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific islands, ed. Michael E. Harkin, xv–xxxvi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 114

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

Hibbert, M. 1998–99. Galileos or grave robbers? Science, the Native American graves protection and repatriation act, and the first amendment. American Indian Law Review 23 (2): 425–58. Higueras, Alvaro. n.d. Sesión 6: Arqueología aplicada y su rol en la sociedades del siglo XXI. Tema: Arqueología y museos. Curso de Arqueología y Prehistoria. Creative Commons. http://www.tiwanakuarcheo.net/curso_arqpreh/ index.html (accessed December 12, 2008). Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. 2000. Digging for identity: Reflections on the cultural background of collecting. In Repatriation reader: Who owns American Indian remains? ed. D. Mihesuah, 37–58. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hubert, J. 1989. A proper place for the dead: A critical review of the “reburial” issue. In Conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, ed. R. Layton, 131–66. London: Unwin Hyman. Kehoe, Alice Beck. 2006. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and revitalization. 2nd ed. Long Grove il: Waveland. Kledal, Anna Rebecca. 1996. Dancing with Hollywood. In Visions Abya Yala: Encounter ’96, ed. Lucía Stacey Retamal, 118. Copenhagen: Naturfolkenes Verden. (First published in the Danish daily Information, August 12, 1996.) McIntyre, L. 1973. The lost empire of the Incas. National Geographic 144 (6) (December): 729–87. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Medicine, Beatrice, and Sue Ellen Jacobs, eds. 2001. Learning to be an anthropologist and remaining “native”: Selected writings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mooney, James. 1896. The Ghost-Dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890. Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892–93. Pt. 2. Washington dc: Government Printing Office. Native America Calling. 2005. The Salta, Argentina, mummies. 53 min., 19 sec., October 6. Recording available online at http://www.nativeamericacalling .org (accessed April 15, 2006). O’Meara, Bridget. 2000. The ecological politics of Leslie Silko’s Almanac of the dead. Wicazo Sa Review 15 (2) (Fall): 63–73. Owens, Louis. 1998. Mixedblood messages: Literature, film, family, place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 115

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

Owsley, D. W., and R. L. Jantz. 2001. Archaeological politics and public interest in paleoamerican studies: Lessons from Gordon Creek Woman and Kennewick Man. American Antiquity 66 (4): 565–75. Politis, Gustavo. 2001. On archaeological praxis, gender bias and indigenous peoples in South America. Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (1): 90–107. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial eyes: Travel eyes and transculturation. London: Routledge. Previgliano, Carlos H., Constanza Ceruti, Johan Reinhard, Facundo Arias Araoz, and Josefina Gonzalez Diez. 2003. Radiologic evaluation of the Llullaillaco mummies. American Journal of Roentgenology 181:1473–79. Pringle, Heather. 1998. The sickness of mummies. Discover (December): 74–83. ———. 1999. Temples of doom. Discover (March): 78–85. Quesenberry, S. V. 1999. Recent United Nations initiatives concerning the rights of indigenous peoples. In Contemporary Native American political issues, ed. Troy R. Johnson, 103–18. Walnut Creek ca: AltaMira. Reinhard, Johan. 1998. Research update: New Inca mummies. National GeoCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

graphic 194 (1) (July): 128–35. ———. 1999. At 22,000 feet children of Inca sacrifice found frozen in time. National Geographic 196 (5) (November): 36–55. ———. 2005. The ice maiden: Inca mummies, mountain gods, and sacred sites in the Andes. Washington dc: National Geographic. Retamal, Lucía Stacey, ed. 1996. Visions Abya Yala: Encounter ’96. Copenhagen: Naturfolkenes Verden. Sawyer, Suzanne. 2001. Fictions of sovereignty: Of prosthetic petro-capitalism, neoliberal states, and phantom-like citizens in Ecuador. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 6 (1): 156–97. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1977. Ceremony. New York: Penguin. ———. 1992. Almanac of the dead. New York: Penguin. Smith, Laurajane. 2004. Archaeological theory and the politics of cultural heritage. London: Routledge. 116

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

kathleen s. fine-dare

Smith, Roger. 1997. The Norton history of the human sciences. New York: W. W. Norton. Stocking, G. W., Jr. 1987. Victorian anthropology. New York: Free Press. Sturm, Circe. 2002. Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Svampa, Maristella, and Claudio Pandolfi. 2004. Las vías de la criminalización de la protesta en Argentina. osal [Observatorio Social de América Latina] 5 (14) (May–August): 285–96. Taussig, Michael. 1983. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism’s culture: Anthropology, travel and government. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Todd, Brenda Kaye. 2005. The disconnection between anthropological theories of ethnicity and identity and the definition of “cultural affiliation” under nagpra. Masters thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder. Urla, Jacqueline, and Jennifer Terry. 1995. Introduction: Mapping embodied deviance. In Deviant bodies: Critical perspectives on difference in science and popular culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, 1–18. Bloomington:

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Indiana University Press. Vargas-Cetina, Gabriela. 2003. Representations of indigenousness. Anthropology News 44 (4) (May): 11–12. Verano, John W. 2001. The physical evidence of human sacrifice in ancient Peru. In Ritual sacrifice in ancient Peru, ed. Elizabeth P. Benson and Anita G. Cook, 165–84. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vitry, Christian. 1998. El patrimonio arqueológico y las “momias” altoandinas. Museo de Antropología de Salta. Artículos. http://www.antropologico.gov.ar/ momias.htm (accessed December 12, 2008). Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa. 2006. International law, museums, and the return of cultural objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wachtel, Nathan. 1994. Gods and vampires: Return to Chipaya. Trans. Carol Volk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitten, Norman E., Jr. 2003. Introduction. In Millennial Ecuador: Critical 117

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

bodies unburied, mummies displayed

essays on cultural transformations and social dynamics, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 1–45. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Whitten, Norman E., Jr., Dorothea Scott Whitten, and Alfonso Chango. 2003. Return of the Yumbo: The caminata from Amazonia to Andean Quito. In Millennial Ecuador: Critical essays on cultural transformations and social dynamics, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 184–215. Iowa City: University of Iowa

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Press.

118

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

5. Crossing Boundaries with Shrunken Heads

steven l. rubenstein

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

travels around core and periphery This essay is motivated by two surprises involving the Shuar. The first occurred in 1998, when I returned to Ecuador to conduct summer research within the Shuar Federation, a political organization of over fifty thousand indigenous people. One day the president of the federation asked me to come by his office before lunch; after everyone left, he unlocked a storage closet, took out a box, and showed me twelve tsantsas, or shrunken heads, that had been deaccessioned and repatriated from the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai) in 1995. Although the Shuar, formerly (and vulgarly) known as the Jívaro, were famous for shrinking the heads of enemies slain in warfare, the last documented tsantsa rituals took place in 1917 (Karsten 1935). When I conducted dissertation research among the Shuar between 1988 and 1992, people told me that they had traded away the last of their tsantsas in the 1950s. Suddenly, something that most Shuar (and anthropologists) had placed securely in the past was immediately present. The second surprise came in 2002 when one of my Shuar compadres telephoned to tell me that he was in New York, staying with friends and looking for work. I admit that this was less a surprise: based on adjusted census data, some estimates indicate that the number of Ecuadorians living in the United States doubled from nearly two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand between 1990 and 2000 (Jokisch 2001; Logan

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

2001), and I had heard Ecuadorians refer to New York as Ecuador’s third largest city. Moreover, I knew my compadre wanted to come to the United States, and I had invited him to visit me. Nonetheless, it is extremely difficult for the average Ecuadorian to get a U.S. visa; it is virtually impossible for Shuar, most of whom have very little income. And while many Ecuadorians come to the United States without documentation, they rely on networks and pay a considerable amount of money, which most Shuar lack, to immigrate. I was delighted that I could go to New York to visit my compadre, but as I sat at a kitchen table with him and two other Shuar, drinking Ecuadorian beer and talking about federation politics, I experienced a sense of geographical dislocation as unsettling, and as exciting, as the temporal dislocation I experienced that summer day in 1998, in the office of the president of the federation. Earlier that day I had taken my friends to the American Museum of Natural History (amnh), where, among many other objects, they fixed upon the museum’s own collection of tsantsas, an experience that they found both unsettling and exciting. This story, of both Shuar shrunken heads and Shuar undocumented workers in New York, is a prime example of what Arjun Appadurai has called an ethnoscape—a geography of deterritorialization in which “moving groups and individuals” (1996, 33) and “primordia (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized” (41).1 He argues that the study of such ethnoscapes is one of the principal ways to study the cultural dimension of globalization. (James Clifford has made a similar argument about the importance of the study of “diverse forms of travel” as a way to grasp “a heterogeneous modernity” [1997b, 3].) One can argue that Americanists have been doing this at least since the time of Alexander Lesser and William Duncan Strong, and Appadurai admits that he is far from the first anthropologist to call attention to the global circulation of people and objects. He argues, however, for the need to study a new phenomenon: the role of the imagination as a social process in the formation of global cultures (1996, 31), and I offer this essay in part because I believe that Americanists should, and are well situated to, contribute to this project. Nevertheless, I take issue with Appadurai’s rejection of models of 120

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

global culture that rely on a distinction between core and periphery.2 His rejection is motivated by a desire to liberate anthropology from its dependence on and role in reproducing what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) called “the savage slot.” Moreover, Appadurai argues that global capitalism is too disorganized (that is, lacking a clear and stable center), and that the relationships (and disjunctions) between the economy, culture, and politics are too complex to make sense of according to the simple binary between core and periphery (1996, 32). Although I take seriously Appadurai’s point that such a deterritorialization radically alters the nature of cultural reproduction, as I observe it, people everywhere—whether in New York or in Ecuador—maintain their own core-periphery distinction. It is not just that some people identify with the core (or the First World, or civilization) while others identify with the periphery (or the Fourth World, or savagery), but as I propose here, people who identify themselves in these different ways also imagine the relationship between core and periphery somewhat differently. Indeed, I argue that we must take seriously the distinction between core and periphery, both as an important way in which people have imagined global cultures and as a way to understand different imaginings of global culture. Deterritorializing flows may deconstruct such oppositions as that between the civilized and the savage, of which the distinction between core and periphery is often a surrogate. But as much as deconstruction disrupts and displaces such oppositions, it always acknowledges the power of their traces. And, I maintain, the power of these traces remains crucial not only to an ethnography of the Americas (or, indeed, the world system itself) but also to Appadurai’s project of understanding the nature of the local in a globalized world (1996, 52). In forming this argument I follow Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s point that deterritorialization is part of a process of reterritorialization, and that “as actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even more salient” (1992, 10; see also Sider 1987). I also appeal to what Ira Bashkow has recently termed “a neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries” (2004). As Matti Bunzl has observed, work by 121

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

theorists such as Gupta and Ferguson is driven by criticisms of a model of culture that was first proposed by Bronislaw Malinowski. That model depends on a clear and rigid boundary between “home” and “the field,” which function as surrogates for “center” and “periphery” (Bunzl 2004, 435). Modified and developed by the students of Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, it gained ascendancy in the United States during the cold war. Bunzl and Bashkow, however, suggest that the work of Franz Boas and his students before World War II provides a more useful approach to cultural flows and boundaries than either the British model or its critics. Following Bashkow, I take the boundary between the core and the periphery (as well as boundaries between Shuar and Euro-Americans, and between the present and the past) to be porous, permeable, and plural (Bashkow 2004, 445–46). Such borders are “conceptual structures centered on symbolic contrasts or oppositions” (451; emphasis in original), that is, sites that not only have material bases and effects but are constructed through, and constantly invite, work of the social imagination. Moreover, I argue, these borders are not sites of absolute difference; crossed by cultural flows they mark relationships, especially asymmetrical and unequal relationships. Thus I am concerned not so much with contrasting ways of imagining difference as with how such contrasting imaginaries reflect and comment on different sides of a relationship.3 Specifically, I argue that the writings of Euro-Americans who left the United States for South America in search of, among other things, head shrinkers and shrunken heads conceptualize a difference between core and periphery in terms of the difference between civilization and savagery. Shuar who have left Ecuador in search of employment in the United States, however, conceptualize a relationship between core and periphery in terms of rich and poor. These contrasting symbolic orders are evident in the different ways in which Euro-Americans in Ecuador and Shuar in New York describe their encounters with tsantsas. For both these objects represent something “other.” For Euro-Americans it is a radically different, savage other, but also an object they wish to possess. This combination of cultural distancing with material accumulation echoes the way 122

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

Europeans and Euro-American settlers have, according to Peter Gow, long identified the forests of the Upper Amazon: as both the home of savage Indians and “the potential or actual source of valuable commodities” (1994, 102). For Shuar, though, the “other” that the tsantsas represent is their own ancestors. In the museum’s tsantsas they discover their own history, and it is this history, and not the tsantsas themselves, that they want to possess.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

encounters between core and periphery, part 1: repatriation Repatriation marks the flow of people and objects through a variety of borderlands—between scientists and indigenous peoples, between core and periphery, between present and past. The twelve tsantsas I saw in Ecuador made their way into the hands of the federation in 1995, when the nmai deaccessioned them and returned them to the Federación Interprovincial de Centros Shuar-Achuar (the Shuar-Achuar Federation).4 The nmai acted out of a sense of ethical, rather than legal, obligation, of course, as the Shuar are not under the aegis of United States federal law.5 This ethical obligation reflects a renegotiation of relations between Native Americans and museum curators following the “civil-rights and anti-Vietnam-war movements” (Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson 1993, 544), which made museum curators more aware of their ethical obligations to the peoples whose cultures they put on display (see Clifford 1997a for more general reflections on the politics and ethics of museum displays of indigenous artifacts). For example, during the 1960s and 1970s, the Smithsonian Institution encouraged and helped Indian tribes to create their own archives and museums; 283 people from 163 different tribes participated in these projects (Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson 1993, 545; see Clifford 1988, 189–251; 1991).6 In 1987, after nine years of negotiation, the Smithsonian Institution repatriated the Ahayu:da, figures of guardian war gods, to the Zuni Pueblo. In 1989 the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, returned the sacred pole, Umon’hon’ti, to the Omaha tribe (Ridington 1993). That same year archeologists from the University of Arkansas sought and 123

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

received permission from the Shoshone-Bannock tribes to analyze a skeleton that was then dated to 10,675 radiocarbon years. After analysis the skeleton was repatriated to the Indians for reburial (Rose, Green, and Green 1996, 98). Between 1989 and 1994 researchers from the University of Nebraska collaborated with the Omaha tribe to analyze skeletal remains in order to reconstruct diet and disease patterns, an analysis that also provided the Omaha with evidence to support their claims to the remains. This emerging relationship between Native Americans and museum curators was recognized and given the force of law by the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act on November 28, 1989, although the museum did not open until October 30, 1994 (Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson 1993, 544), and by the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (nagpra) on November 6, 1990, which was enforced immediately. As discussed in the essays in this volume by James Zeidler and Kathleen Fine-Dare, the passage of nagpra promoted and reinforced this new relationship. As Zeidler and Les Field discuss in this book (see also Fine-Dare 2002; Tabah 1993; Vizenor 1986), nagpra redefined Indian-white relations in the United States in terms of both indigenous rights and mutual recognition by recognizing Native Americans’ interests in cultural artifacts and human remains found on federal land.7 nagpra is a highly compressed, legislated signpost to several borderlands. It recognizes that such objects may be of “ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself” (U.S. Code 25, sec. 3001 [2][d]) and protects objects from illegal trafficking (U.S. Code 25, sec. 3001 [4]), inadvertent discovery (U.S. Code 25, sec. 3001 [3][d])—and archeological excavation (U.S. Code 25, sec. 3001 [3][c]). Thus lawyers have called attention to the potential and actual conflicts between Native Americans and archeologists, as two sets of symbolically condensed protagonists who occupy this legal-cultural borderland where “core” meets “periphery”—in frequently antagonistic ways. For instance, in their respective analyses of litigation concerning “Kennewick Man,” Rebecca Tsosie raises the question, “can ‘cultural belief’ ever measure up to ‘science’”? (1999, 598), and Douglas Ackerman 124

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

argues that there is an irreconcilable conflict between Anglo-American culture, which privileges logic, and Native American culture, which privileges supernatural beliefs (1997–98, 380). However, despite the sharp divide created in the realm of rhetoric, scientists and Native Americans have by no means always been in conflict. These examples not only reveal the possibility of mutual understanding between the educational and scientific aims of researchers and the religious responsibilities of Native Americans; they also suggest that there was, in some respects, a mutual recognition between scientists and Native Americans that made nagpra possible. In this context the return of twelve tsantsas from the nmai to the Shuar-Achuar Federation in Ecuador seems to provide a similar example of collaboration.8 Notwithstanding, I argue that the repatriation of the tsantsas is significantly different, not only because the Shuar are a South American people but also because the concepts of ownership and property in the Shuar case differ from the other examples. As Rebecca Tsosie has observed, nagpra begins with a principle of Anglo-American property law, which recognizes that the next-of-kin of the deceased has “quasi-property” rights and extends this principle to include lineal descendants (1999, 634). She argues, however, that adjudication of nagpra claims must recognize that Native Americans have a much broader view of the relationship between themselves and their ancestors, which leads to a notion of collective property rights unknown in AngloAmerican law (1999, 644–45). When museums recognize this, repatriation can go smoothly without recourse to additional legal mechanisms. For instance, in the case of Umon’hon’ti, Peabody Museum officials acknowledged that they had been guardians of the sacred pole, as Omaha leaders in 1888 had sent their sacred pole east for safekeeping without relinquishing ownership (Ridington 1993, 85). In the case of the Ahay:uda, Zuni leaders insisted that the figures were always community property and inalienable, and that the Smithsonian Institution never had legal title (Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson 1993, 536–37). In this context one might think that the return of the nmai tsantsas to 125

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

the federation would have involved a lengthy and contentious process. For one thing the nmai tsantsas had been acquired by the museum legally (see Jones and Harris 1998), and leaders of the Shuar Federation never questioned the legality of the museum’s claims. Moreover, whether by the specific criteria of nagpra or by indigenous notions of property advocated by jurists such as Tsosie, the origins of the heads seem to provide little basis for Shuar ownership as they are made out of the heads of Shuar enemies. Finally, at the time that the heads were taken and shrunk, the Shuar had no corporate identity or notion of collective ownership. Even today no Shuar suggests that the warriors of past generations did not have the right to exchange their tsantsas for trade goods. But even if the nmai abdicated any claims to ownership of the tsantsas, repatriation should still have been a sticky process, because most of the heads are the human remains of the Achuar and the cultural items of the Shuar.9 Despite all these issues, the return of the nmai tsantsas to the Shuar Federation was remarkably quick and easy. Equally remarkable was the fact that it was the museum, not the Shuar, who initiated the process of return. The significance of the tsantsas for leaders of the federation is a complex topic I address in a separate article (Rubenstein 2007).10 For present purposes, however, I note only that although all Shuar acknowledge with pride the importance of tsantsas in their culture, many do not believe it is important to possess them. For example, Miguel Puwáinchir, the former president of the Shuar Federation who first visited the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, told me, “It is fine to have a relic made by our ancestors to put in a [Shuar] museum, to remind us of part of our culture. But as an example of one of the practices of the culture I live in, of the world I live in, well, that is impossible. I prefer to teach my children that this is part of our culture and now we have to try to kill poverty, illiteracy, the different illnesses that attack us, the lack of basic services such as [potable] water and electricity.” Puwáinchir was less concerned about possessing actual tsantsas—the products of war against the Achuar—and more concerned about invoking the violence and power they represent in a war against poverty. The process leading up to repatriation began in 1991, when Puwáinchir 126

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

and Felipe Tsenkush (then vice president of the federation) visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington dc to participate in the Folklife Festival. They then went to New York to serve as guest curators for the All Roads Are Good exhibition at the nmai. They refused to look at the tsantsas stored at the nmai’s Research Branch in the Bronx, not because they were ashamed of or revolted by them, but rather out of respect for the dead. Moreover, they told the curator, they felt the tsantsas should not be on display because they no longer represent who the Shuar and Achuar are.11 After Tsenkush was elected president of the federation, he returned to the United States to attend the 1994 festival and had another chance to see the tsantsas possessed by the institution. It was at that time, at the invitation of the museum, that Tsenkush began arranging for the repatriation of the heads to the Shuar Federation, which took place on October 6, 1995 (today Tsenkush and Puwáinchir would like to display the heads in a Shuar museum). My purpose in presenting this account is to call attention to the striking contrast between the return of the tsantsas and other cases of repatriation. In the case of the return of the Ahayu:da, representatives of both the Smithsonian Institution and the Zuni Pueblo claimed ownership of the items in question, and it took nine years of careful negotiation and dialogue to effect the repatriation. In the case of the return of the tsantsas, neither the nmai nor the Shuar claimed unalienable ownership—and the arrangements (hardly even a “negotiation”) took one year. Certainly, one reason the return of the tsantsas was so quick and easy owes to the unique nature of the nmai, which, by an act of Congress— and unlike any other museum I know of—makes repatriation a core obligation of the museum.12 However, the act in question refers only to Native Americans in the United States and Hawaiian Natives and does not apply to Meso-American or South American Indians. (The relationship between the nmai and Native Americans outside the United States is an issue that warrants further research.) Nevertheless, the origins of the nmai promote among its directors and curators a more general sense of ethical obligation, and I have no doubt that one reason for the ease of this process was the mutual respect and good will between representatives of 127

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

the nmai and the Shuar Federation. Although I find this a satisfactory explanation for why the museum returned the heads to the Shuar, I am not satisfied that this is the reason the process was so smooth and quick. I believe that a central reason for the ease of this unusual repatriation lies in the power of tsantsas to unsettle. They represent an earlier time for both museum curators and Shuar leaders; they provoke ambivalent feelings about the past and uncertainties about their meanings in the present. For museum curators and visitors, they indicate the power of a museum to represent the whole world under one roof, but they also represent a distasteful obsession with savagery left over from the age of colonial expansion and exploration. For Shuar they recall the power and independence of their fathers or grandfathers, but they also remind them of a time when escalating warfare devastated many Shuar households, in some cases reducing their population by half.13 The lack of contention on either side reflects an unacknowledged distancing by both contemporary museum curators and Shuar leaders from the violent origins of the heads. It simultaneously obscures the peripheryto-core complexity, which is revealed by looking briefly at two kinds of headhunting: that carried out by the Shuar, and that carried out by European collectors.14 The ease of the process also had the effect of creating a silence; neither the museum nor the federation publicized it widely. This silence would be echoed, as it were, seven years later when, standing next to the tsantsa display at the amnh, my Shuar companions introduced themselves to a number of other museumgoers and discovered that they had little to say to one another. journey to the periphery The Producers Today most Shuar live in the montaña—the easternmost foothills of the Andes mountains and the uppermost fringe of the Amazon rainforest, between 1,200 and 400 meters above sea level.15 Prior to the founding of the federation in 1964, the Shuar lived in “a society where there [was] no state, no chiefdom, no corporate kin groups, and, really, no locus of 128

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

authority which [could] impose judicial decisions and enforce them” (Harner 1984, 170), and the basic unit of social structure and the center of social life was the polygynous household (Harner 1984, 41). The ultimate sign of power for Shuar men was the possession of the shrunken heads of casualties of war, or tsantsas.16 Indeed, the immediate cause of war was neither vengeance nor the acquisition of land, but simply the acquisition of heads as signs of power (Harner 1984, 182). Heads were taken from non-Shuar with whom the Shuar otherwise lived in peace (most commonly from the Achuar, who lived to the east).17 These raids were organized and led by a veteran warrior who had already killed several people (Harner 1984, 183; see Hendricks 1993, 157) and required the sponsorship of another veteran warrior who would later act as master of ceremonies for the rituals and celebrations that occurred following the return of the war party. The son-in-law of the organizer recruited young men from other households to participate in the raid. Typically, a war party consisted of thirty or forty men from various households (Harner 1984, 183–84). Although these raids and the rituals that followed involved the coordination and cooperation of many men, each head taken in the raid belonged to the individual warrior who took it (see Karsten 1935, 259–92). Accounts of what happened to tsantsas after the various rituals and feasts (see Karsten 1935, 293–367) are contradictory. According to Michael Harner, Shuar men often held on to tsantsas after the feast, but as “decorative keepsakes” or as personal adornments “worn by the head-taker on solitary, meditative walks in the forest”; upon his death his tsantsas would be buried with him (1984, 191). According to Philippe Descola, after the rituals heads were “simply discarded without a fuss” (1996, 275). As Harner (1984), Jane Bennett Ross (1984), and Daniel Steel (1999) point out, however, many warriors traded their tsantsas for manufactured goods. The Collectors The trade between Shuar and whites of tsantsas and manufactured goods and the eventual return of the tsantsas—just two examples of the way people and their values (both material and symbolic) circulate widely and 129

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

freely today—seem to efface the boundaries between core and periphery, civilization and savagery, by crossing them with so much ease and so little comment. Nonetheless, although I share Appadurai’s conviction that anthropologists must critique, deconstruct, or transcend these oppositions, I believe that we must take them seriously—precisely because they help explain why North Americans and other Westerners have imagined global cultures in terms of a divide between civilized and savage (images with which Indians such as the Shuar often must contend, as much when they are at home as when they are abroad), and also because it helps us understand how and why indigenous people such as the Shuar imagine global culture quite differently than do people at its core. This difference has its immediate origin in the nineteenth century, when this particular ethnoscape first began to emerge. Ultimately, it originated in the sixteenth century, when the Amazon, like many other areas far from Europe, became an object of European interest (see Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982). By the fifteenth century, “diminishing surpluses drove the Europeans to seek resources abroad, especially as increased wealth was required to finance the emergent states” (Wolf 1982, 129). This search for resources, primarily in places not controlled by territorial states, was accompanied by a more general search for knowledge and, not incidentally, adventure. Thus, this process has been documented not only in official records but in unofficial literary works. Mary Louise Pratt has divided Western travel writing into three distinct epochs, each of which corresponds with an epoch of Western colonial expansion or consolidation. From 1750 to 1800, European powers sponsored expeditions to study and classify the natural world. This epoch was anticipated in 1735, when the French government organized an international scientific expedition to equatorial South America to determine whether the earth is a sphere or a spheroid (Pratt 1992, 15–16). Apart from the scientific data collected, this voyage is best remembered for the travelogue of Charles de La Condamine, one of the surviving members of the trip. Although his narrative, published in 1745, recounts his attempts to map the Amazon and its tributaries, it was “written mainly not as a scientific report, but in the popular genre of survival literature. Alongside 130

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

navigation, survival literature’s two great themes are hardship and danger on the one hand, and marvels and curiosities on the other” (20). From 1800 to 1850, “the end of Spanish colonial rule entailed a fullscale renegotiation of relations between Spanish America and Northern Europe—relations of politics and economics, and with equal necessity, relations of representation and imagination.” On the one hand, northern Europeans reevaluated South America as a new target for their commodities, technologies, and capital. On the other hand, newly independent Spanish American elites were now faced with the task of nation building (Pratt 1992, 112). From 1860 to 1980, explorers traveled through areas long since mapped, colonized, and brought under state control, to talk to natives and then convert “local knowledges (discourse) into European national and continental knowledges associated with European forms and relations of power” (202). Although these three epochs serve to classify, frame, and interpret a great deal of travel writing, in the Amazon the first epoch of travel writing did not end in 1800 but instead extended into the twentieth century. The Amazon basin is one of the largest peripheral regions of the global capitalist economy, and even today it is relatively unpopulated by European or Euro-American colonists. Although it has been a part of the global economy since the late sixteenth century, it has been subject to relatively short boom-and-bust cycles, depending on which of its resources Europeans and Euro-Americans have sought to exploit (spices in the seventeenth century, rubber in the nineteenth century, oil in the twentieth century). Only a minuscule amount of the wealth generated from such exploitation has been reinvested in the Amazon, and even then only in the minimum technology required by any given extractive enterprise (Bunker 1985, 55; see also Burkhalter and Murphy 1989; Fisher 2000; Murphy and Murphy 1985). Consequently, for all the demographic and social changes that have occurred among Amazonian Indians since the Spanish and Portuguese conquest (see A.-C. Taylor 1996), some indigenous groups are still linked to the world economy by only a thread, and for many Westerners, the Amazon still occupies the same place in their cultural imagination as it did three centuries ago. 131

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

In the late nineteenth century Shuar culture was territorialized in the global imagination of Europeans and Euro-Americans through the circulation of tsantsas. There is evidence that Shuar and neighboring groups, collectively called Jívaro, shrank the heads of enemies killed in warfare in the 1500s, prior to contact, but there is little evidence that Westerners were interested in this practice until the 1860s. When Euro-Ecuadorians began to settle the region in the 1880s, they occasionally traded manufactured goods, such as shotguns and machetes, with Shuar, in return for game, salt, and tsantsas. Settlers would sell these heads to dealers in the highlands, who often sold them to Europeans and North Americans. At the same time Shuar began to use Western-manufactured shotguns and steel lance heads in warfare. As Jane Bennett Ross has remarked, the concurrent increase in intergroup warfare and guns-for-heads trade suggests that some Shuar may have been producing tsantsas for export (Bennett Ross 1984, 89–90; see also Steel 1999, 754–59). Adventure narratives written by Fritz Up de Graff, who left New York for Ecuador in 1894, and Leonard Clark, who left California for Peru in 1946, fall squarely within the genre of “survival literature” pioneered by La Condamine in 1745. They tell of men who traveled widely and endured much hardship for the purpose of accumulating wealth and knowledge, and, not incidentally, tsantsas. Paradoxically, their narratives simultaneously identify their own desire to “conquer” the Amazon as a mark of civilization and Shuar, Aguaruna, and Huambisa headhunting as a mark of savagery. In writing of their travels among the Shuar and neighboring groups in Ecuador and Peru, these men describe a world outside their control, a world of rain and snakes, deceitful Hispanics, and dangerous Indians. Clark believes that his search, which relies largely on rumor and progresses through various chance encounters, is actually playing out the grand purposeful struggle between savagery and civilization. He is at war with nature itself: “The jungle is your enemy,” his guide tells him as they set out. “It will destroy you if it can—and it never sleeps” (Clark 1953, 23). The great gamble of his adventure is actually a cold contest against the natives of this jungle: “It was a calculated roll of the dice—my neck against the Indians’ secrets” (32). 132

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

The prize, for both Up de Graff and Clark, was gold. According to Clark (1953, 4) the real purpose of his adventure was to find El Dorado, the ancient lost cities of Incan gold. Up de Graff too saw the Amazon as a source of rubber and gold. Yet the amount of gold they actually found scarcely seems reasonable compensation for the dangers and privations of their journeys. I believe that the lengthy books they wrote about their travels reveal that such dangers and privations, far from being a means to the end of collecting gold, are the real object of their travels—the ability to skirt and even cross the treacherous line between civilization and savagery (see Lévi-Strauss [1955] 1973: 37–44; Rubenstein 2006). It is striking how Euro-Americans, despite maintaining their moral and cultural differentiation from the Shuar, actually colluded with Shuar in trafficking tsantsas. This paradox is most evident in the story of F. W. Up de Graff and a few other North Americans panning for gold in the Upper Amazon in 1899. One day they encountered a large group of Jívaro, who offered them protection from a neighboring group; the prospectors, however, suspected that these Indians were themselves a threat. At first they answered that they could take care of themselves, but then they explained that they themselves were a war party and invited the Jívaro to join them in attacking a nearby community (Up de Graff 1923, 252–53). Although Up de Graff claims that neither he nor his companions fired a shot during the ensuing raid, he does admit to lending his machete to one of the Jívaro to aid in cutting the head off a wounded but still living woman (274). Up de Graff admits that readers might misunderstand his motives. He emphasizes that the Jívaro methods of warfare are cowardly and distasteful to the “true white man who is brought up to a code of fair play” (1923, 270). His heart, he insists, was not really in the butchery; all he really wanted was gold. But this precious metal was not the only thing he wanted to collect. After the slaughter the North Americans chose to stay with their Indian companions, in part, as Up de Graff explains, because they “were anxious to trade the Jívaros out of their trophies” (285). Thus, the mercantile values of the core were crucial to his imagining of the distinction between civilized and savage: the Jívaro valued the heads as 133

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

trophies of warfare, but for Euro-Americans they were just another precious commodity found in the Amazon. And after their journeys into the savage Amazon, they still returned to their homes civilized men. the periphery at home in the core

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

The Consumers Travelogues such as Up de Graff’s celebrate the act of collecting discursively. The end results of such acts are celebrated materially in institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Natural History, which represent (among other things) the periphery in the core. These museums did not acquire all their tsantsas through the efforts of adventurous curators or sponsored expeditions.18 Most were donated by individuals who had come to possess but did not want these objects. Robert Carneiro, curator of the Hall of South American Indians at the amnh, told me of a widow who had never liked the shrunken head her husband possessed. While he was alive, she insisted that it be kept hidden in a closet; upon his death she was finally able to get rid of it. On another occasion a young man discovered a shrunken head in a warehouse full of his late grandfather’s belongings. Informed that the warehouse was to be destroyed, he donated it to the museum. Significantly, none of these people could do what explorers and ethnographers report the Shuar as having done after the shrunken-head feast or after the death of the warrior: throw them away or bury them. Even when unwanted they had to be hoarded and stored in a closet or warehouse. When even that became unnecessary or impractical, they had to go to a museum—the public’s (and public) closet.19 The American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution are examples of what Mieke Bal calls “metamuseums,” large, ambitious museums that display not only their collections but also older forms of display (in other words, they put themselves, and the very idea of “museums,” on display) (1992, 260; see also Ames 1986). But they do so in a peculiar way, one that typically highlights the objects of collection while effacing the act of collecting so vividly described in travelogues. 134

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

Although trophies of colonial expansion acquired by Euro-Ecuadorians in the Upper Amazon, tsantsas are presented as trophies of Shuar warfare, accompanied by explanatory texts, enabling museums to present themselves not as collectors of shrunken human heads but as collectors and exhibitors of, and educators about, tokens of “Shuar culture” (and, of course, of tokens of many other cultures; see also Torgovnick 1990 and Feest 1993). Although the curators of specific exhibits typically view themselves as educators who use objects on display as a means to illustrate and explain diverse cultural practices, the organization of metamuseums suggest other meanings, other uses, of such objects. Thus tokens of various cultures, such as tsantsas, are further recontextualized as part of the much larger collection—one that makes sense only to the viewer who has access to the collection as a whole. As Susan Stewart has suggested, such collections privilege the position of the core as the center of consumption on a global scale (1993, 162; see also Mitchell 1989). Objects that were originally commodities become something else when they are collected and put on display. Used but never used up, they are not so much objects of consumption as fetishes of consumption (Stewart 1993, 164). The ultimate effacement of the original act of collecting was achieved through a mimetic act in 1995, when administrators of the amnh devised a way to cast its consumers as collectors. The museum commemorated its 125th anniversary by instituting a special series of “expeditions” designed to help visitors create their own pathways through the museum’s vast and magnificent permanent collection. Titled Expedition: Treasures from 125 Years of Discovery, the first of these expeditions leads visitors on a journey that crisscrosses the globe and spans millions of years without ever leaving the museum (American Museum of Natural History 1995, 1). According to the museum’s fact sheet (which is quoted extensively in a brochure for visitors), “museum scientists . . . selected fifty treasures from among the more than 30 million artifacts and specimens in the collection” (although museum administrators and museum scientists had conflicting interests).20 Visitors enter through a “base camp,” where they receive a guidebook and audio guide. “With these tools in hand, 135

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

participants can chart their own pathways through the collection. Visitors can follow a prescribed path or plan their own expedition through the Museum’s halls” (American Museum of Natural History 1995, 1).21 Through this mimetic act, people from the core can now travel to the periphery without ever actually leaving the core and its comforts. The emphasis on “treasures” evokes not only the adventures of treasure seekers but also the expeditions of anthropologists of an earlier age. The word “treasure,” ironically, evokes both rarity and abundance, and both senses are important to the museum’s “expeditions.” On the one hand, being in the presence of something rare evokes a thrill, which I believe owes not to the fact that the object is one (or one of a few) of a kind, but rather to the fact that a rare object has a precarious existence. One can easily tolerate the loss of a common object that is easily replaced. The loss of a unique object, however, is a tragedy—and the possibility of the loss of a unique object arouses an anxiety that we prefer to experience as awe and excitement. This is precisely the sense that Up de Graff and Clark tried to evoke in their desire to behold things that no one else (meaning, no white person) had ever seen. For some time anthropologists evoked this experience as well. Thus Bronislaw Malinowski mourned the fact that “at the very moment when [anthropology] puts its house in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity” ([1922] 1984, xv). And Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that “now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, . . . when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?” ([1955] 1973, 38). Would that this were so. On the contrary I believe that the narratives of Up de Graff and Clark and the exhibits of natural history museums work precisely to divert us from any confrontation with our own history. This is the effect of “Expeditions” as well. Drawing on objects on 136

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

permanent display as well as previously warehoused objects, “expeditions” constitute a new circulation within the museum. By using a “treasure hunt” to move people all over the museum, they call attention to abundance as much as to rarity. The museum thus remains a temple of accumulation; the fact sheet emphasizes the size and permanence of the collection. But people worship in this temple in a new way. As Stewart has observed, collections allow people to experience the world system from an objective position. Nonetheless, even as the “fifty treasures” of the “expedition” epitomize the museum’s collection, they are the antithesis of “collections,” juxtaposing as they do such different objects as the Star of India sapphire, the Haida canoe, the blue whale, the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, Margaret Mead, and unisexual whiptail Lizards. Such a “collection” represents neither the local contexts of the artifacts nor the formal criteria often used by curators, because the “fifty treasures” are not meant to educate visitors about the meanings or the functions of the objects. The heterogeneity of this catalog serves to represent the diversity of the museum’s collection and, by implication, of the world; the expedition itself is an experience in space-time compression, allowing one to make in one day and in one building “a journey that crisscrosses the globe and spans millions of years.” “Expedition” thus represents the postmodern condition, what Fredric Jameson terms “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1991), and David Harvey identifies as a system of “flexible accumulation” (1989, 63).22 A feature of late capitalism is the expansion of commodity relations from the sphere of production into the sphere of consumption. This expansion functions by defining power not in terms of control over one’s labor (socialism) or over the nation-state (democracy) but rather in terms of control over what one buys (consumerism). Consumers do not see their individual identities as mediated by the marketplace, their choices manufactured by the world economy in response to shifts in labor and capital. Rather, they see consumption as mediated by their individuality, with the result that consumption becomes a production: the production of personal style. Thus visitors to the museum “chart their own pathways . . . plan their own expedition” (note how the word “own” transforms 137

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the visitor’s act from one of consumption to one of possession and thus transforms the typical, overwhelming experience of such museums to one in which the individual is the master). Not just the collection but the whole process of accumulation is personalized as each visitor embarks on his or her own “treasure hunt.” This is less like an expedition and more like a shopping spree. Under the regime of flexible accumulation, then, people mediate their relation to the world system not as collectors but as consumers. “Expedition” formalizes and celebrates a common trait of museums: “It is the visitor who is in motion, and the objects, and by implication the relationships they embody, are all curiously lifeless” (Riegel 1996, 86; cf. Bal 1992, 561). In domesticating circulation and subordinating it to accumulation and consumption, such exhibits negate the very circulation that makes them possible—a violent circulation that linked production to expenditure. Between the functions of research, on the one hand, and entertainment, on the other, emerges a particular kind of education, one that ironically fails to educate people about the museum’s own making, its own strategic location in circuits of production and consumption, its role in linking capitalist expansion to consumer fetishism. “’Expedition’ ends, as all great adventures must, at the gift shop.”23 journeying from the periphery The Discoverers After newly independent New World states consolidated political control over territory that had been settled by Europeans (and, in many cases, African slaves), they began to expand into territories still populated largely by Indians. When Euro-Americans began to offer manufactured instruments of production in return for tsantsas, they initiated a process through which the overall reproduction of Shuar society increasingly came to depend materially on relations with outsiders. In the early years of colonization most Shuar were encouraged by the state to raise cattle and sell lumber, but now Shuar have little to sell to Euro-Americans besides their labor. Leaders of the federation (see Salazar 1981 and Rubenstein 2001 138

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

for a history of the formation of the federation) are salaried by the state, through agreements with ministries such as health and education, but virtually all Shuar—like their Ecuadorian neighbors—believe they can make more money working in the United States. Like the tales of adventurers such as Up de Graff and Clark, Shuar migrants in the United States tell of the obstacles and dangers they overcome in search of wealth. But whereas Up de Graff and Clark could journey to the Amazon because the expansion of the global capitalist economy created opportunities for Europeans and Euro-Americans, Shuar—like many others from South America and Africa—journey to North America and Europe because their incorporation into the world economy has put them and their families in a desperate situation.24 Consequently, while there are interesting similarities between the stories of Shuar migrants and those of Up de Graff and Clark, they reflect a different set of values and are used by Shuar to different ends. In a way the United States is the Shuar’s own El Dorado.25 “From a young age,” one Shuar told me, “I thought, everyone knew that there was a lot of money in the United States, because a lot of people would go and bring back money, and someday I had to go too.” But whereas North Americans saw the Amazon as a source of natural resources, this Shuar understands that the wealth of the United States is social in character: “I have to get there at least to see how businesses produce, how people work.” Another similarity between the Shuar journey to the United States and the journey of white adventurers to the Ecuadorian Amazon is the peril. One Shuar borrowed money from an Ecuadorian settler to fly to Guatemala, whence he traveled to Mexico. From Tijuana I went to Los Angeles, forty of us in a pickup truck. . . . A patrol in Mexico fired at us and our car rolled over. They caught some of us; others ran to Tijuana and others ran to Los Angeles. . . . The trip was hard, it was almost like being in the army, and I used those techniques to hide out. About twenty of us made it to Los Angeles. We had to go through a sewer, and when we came out—I don’t know how many kilometers—we were close to a hotel. 139

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

I stayed in Los Angeles fifteen days until I had the money to fly to New York. I knew an Ecuadorian “settler” [colono, a nonindigenous Ecuadorian who has settled in Amazonia] in New York and called him, but he wouldn’t take any of my calls. When I arrived at the airport, jfk, I was desperate. “Where is this Juan?” I didn’t see anyone; I was alone. I went outside, and a white man said, “Look, I’m going to take you out of here, but will drop you off in Manhattan.” In Manhattan I went into the subway. I rode the number 7 train for three days and three nights, from Manhattan to Queens, from Queens to Manhattan. I didn’t eat for three days. I wasn’t hungry, but I was worried, just thinking, “What am I going to do? I would rather be lost in the jungle than be here.” After three days I began to get hungry and I went outside. By chance I met a man, and he says “Countryman!” He saw that I looked bad; I was thin, I weighed 105, and he said, “I’ll take you to my house just for one day. Then I’ll call someone, or you can go wherever you want.” He took me to his house; he called some friends and learned of a guy who had some work. I left and

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

found work ironing leather.

This narrative, too, differs from that of the white adventurer in its subordination to the social. Adventurers such as Up de Graff and Clark call attention to their deprivation and discomfort as props in tales of heroic individualism. But the Shuar who told me of their travels north emphasized their suffering not in order to glamorize their own initiative or courage but rather to emphasize the lengths to which they had gone to help their families. Indeed, it is their distance from their families that is the greatest source of pain: “I would cry. I would cry in front of all the women. I was thinking of Ecuador, of my children. During that time, a snake bit my son in Shimpis; I contacted my family after a month and a half and learned that a snake bit my son. I felt desperate; I wasn’t even sending them any money.” The bulk of these travelers’ stories tell of their attempts to find work, their hard labor, and the sacrifice they make for their families. One Shuar ended his story in tears, telling me, “I want to go back to Ecuador, and 140

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

I am going to go back very soon. I have been here for many years, and I need to see my family, my children . . . it makes me feel bad. I want my children to stay in Ecuador, because people who come here suffer. My daughter is sixteen and my son is . . . I send money, and I call, but it makes me feel bad; it’s very hard.” Part of their pain is the disillusionment of discovering that even though they have left the impoverished South for the wealthy North, they remain poor and, in too many ways, helpless.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

encounters between core and periphery, part 2: gazes Although the Shuar no longer subscribe to the efficacy of tsantsa rituals, memories of these rituals nevertheless continue to play an important symbolic role in reproducing Shuar identity.26 The existence of actual tsantsas in North American museums force the Shuar to imagine the global ethnoscape of which they are a part. Unlike the leaders of the Shuar Federation, however, my Shuar friends in New York expressed no interest in the repatriation of the heads at the amnh. Unlike white headhunters such as Up de Graf, these Shuar did not need to possess tsantsas. On the contrary, as I shall explain, for migrant Shuar workers their connection to the heads is meaningful precisely because they are so distant. When I offered to take my Shuar friends to the museum, I explained that I wanted to show them the tsantsas on display there. As we traveled into Manhattan, however, they mostly talked about how little they knew of New York, how they typically spent all their time in their ethnic (and undocumented immigrant) enclave neighborhood or at work, unsure of where they could safely travel. Overwhelmed by the size of the museum, they immediately grasped its function to represent the power of the core. This power was communicated to them most immediately, although ambiguously, as we climbed the steps to the main entrance and they saw people lining up to present themselves to guards. They panicked: they do not speak English, had no identification with them, and were afraid of being detained. I explained that in fact the authorities of the museum were afraid of a terrorist attack, and that the guards were merely checking people’s bags. As we silently submitted to the cursory search, I realized 141

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

how a form of power I took for granted appeared to my friends as unpredictable and was easily misunderstood. The museum also confirmed their sense that New York is at the center of the world, while their awareness of their undocumented status and inability to read signs in English reminded them of their own peripheral status. At the same time—like most museumgoers—they experienced their position as consumers of the collection as liberating and exciting, as they ran from one hall to another, in each one discovering new marvels. When I later asked them what their favorite parts of the museum had been, they mentioned not the tsantsas but rather what was exotica for them: the stuffed animals from Africa, gemstones, and asteroids. They also emphasized that they had seen only a small portion of the collections and saw in their visit an opportunity to belong to a much bigger world than they had previously imagined. Their initial reaction to the tsantsas was startlingly different: confronted with objects that may very well have been made by their fathers or grandfathers, they were moved and awestruck. Nevertheless, they were content for the heads to remain in the museum. They understood, indeed, they expected, that New Yorkers and tourists would be as excited to view the tsantsas as they were to view elephant tusks. They did not, however, emphasize their own similarity to other museumgoers. Instead, they spoke of how tsantsas could provide museumgoers a way to experience others (namely, them) in terms of relationships rather than absolute difference. They assumed that just as they were interested in learning more about North American culture, the presence of the heads in the museum expressed North American interest in Shuar culture; moreover, they felt that the heads represent a Shuar presence in the center of the world. They were, however, dissatisfied by the relatively impersonal explanatory text accompanying the display and talked of the hard work and skill of their ancestors who made the tsantsas. They were also disappointed that the display was located next to artifacts of other peoples rather than other Shuar artifacts and commented that the heads were presented out of context—not just cultural but also historical context.27 It is, I believe, 142

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

this lack of historical context rather than the actual physical location of the heads that signals the peripheral status of the Shuar. To the Shuar this lack of context was tantamount to a lack of recognition, for they internalize the heads in terms of a complex sort of otherness. They do not see the heads as representing who they are (because they themselves do not shrink heads); the heads represent who they personally are not. Nevertheless, I suggest that this lack of recognition was of positive value to my Shuar companions. In the nineteenth century what was important was that the heads were not Shuar but rather were taken from the neighboring Achuar (with whom they sometimes traded). Today this difference is no longer important; what matters is that the heads were taken and shrunk not by them but by their ancestors. Either way this “not” is never an absolute negativity. In the past it expressed not only distance but also proximity; today it expresses not only distance but also possession. They identify the heads with their ancestors. Thus the heads now serve as markers of their own past. In short, the heads are the most material and visible means the Shuar have for identifying themselves as a people with history. The distance between the Shuar and their past—between these migrant workers in New York and their head-shrinking grandfathers or great-grandfathers—constitutes a largely unknown territory. Until recently the Shuar lacked a written history; even today the written history available to them is superficial and simplistic and largely takes the form of textbooks for children. Moreover, since such textbooks have been written mostly by missionaries or government bureaucrats, they reflect the ideological interests of the church or the state. Some books, written by missionaries who have adopted an ethnographic voice or even by Western ethnographers and translated into Spanish, do attempt to provide an “authentic” portrait of the Shuar. Yet Shuar are often confused or even alienated by these books, which describe in the present tense a way of life that is foreign to them. Of course they understand that these books were written many decades ago and are meant to represent the past, but the stories these books tell do not even correlate with the stories their parents or grandparents used to tell. I do not think this means that classic 143

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

ethnographies of the Shuar are wrong or mistaken. It might simply be that the story a Shuar would tell an anthropologist and the story he would tell his grandchild would be different: both stories equally partial, both stories equally true. I do know, however, that the books Shuar read about their own culture represent a dated and in some ways dubious project.28 For example, when Michael Harner (who is still remembered with fondness and respect by those Shuar who knew him) wrote his classic ethnography Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls, he worked within the twentieth-century paradigm of describing a culture in its own terms. Harner was delighted when, in the 1978 Spanish translation of his book, Aíjiu Juank wrote a preface explaining how the ethnography had value for Shuar, noting, “[It will] help us to rediscover our dignity and to regain the equilibrium that we need for an authentic development, based on our own values” (quoted in Harner 1984, xv). Harner did not know that Aíjiu Juank was actually Alfredo Germani, an Italian-born Catholic missionary, which raises the question of whether this ethnography was being used to promote Shuar values or missionary values. This is a practical and a political question for many Shuar, who have concluded that missionary attempts to isolate Shuar from Ecuadorian society (in the course of what Germani calls “authentic development”), far from protecting Shuar, only made them dependent on missionaries for access to the larger world. Today federation officials no longer depend on missionaries and travel not only to Quito (the capital of Ecuador) but also to Europe and the United States (to participate in international conferences). Other Shuar, like my friends, travel to Los Angeles or New York in search of jobs. When they come upon tsantsas in a New York museum, they encounter not only a physical piece of their past but also evidence that their grandparents and great-grandparents also participated (even if only minimally) in a world system. The Shuar claim their place in this world system as their own, not in the sense that it is exclusively theirs—because like their grandparents, whether in Ecuador or New York, they share space with others—but in the sense that an understanding of others might explain who they are and how they came to be. They are not sure what such an explanation might actually be, and as we stood by the display, my friends shared some 144

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

of the stories their fathers or grandfathers had told them. Ultimately, I believe, their curiosity about this moving past, this ethnoscape, is closely bound up with their own claim to territory: territory in the Amazon that they view as their inheritance from their ancestors but also a place in a larger world, one in which they are not isolated but rather are constantly forging new relationships with others.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

empty meeting grounds Arjun Appadurai has argued that globalization, with its “overlapping sets of ecumenes” (1996, 28) and the disjunctures between different kinds of cultural flow (33), requires a “cosmopolitan ethnography” (51), an ethnography that recognizes that today even “natives” are cosmopolitan (57).29 Jonathan Friedman, however, has argued that globalization primarily involves “the decentralization of capital accumulation” and cycles of accumulation that occur at such a rapid pace that shifts in the geographic centers of wealth and financial dynamism are short-lived (1999, 5) and requires a study of new “dynamics of class formation in the global system” (9; see also P. Taylor 1999, 38–43; Taylor, Watts, and Johnston 1995, 379–80, 383–85), one of which involves the development of class structures among indigenous peoples. From this view, what appears from a global perspective to be cosmopolitan natives are from the local perspective elites (e.g., Shuar Federation officials) whose access to capital and control of land enable them to convert their own kin into a subordinate class (1999, 10). Clearly, many of the Shuar who now seek to journey to the United States in search of higher wages belong to just such a class. As Friedman observes, such “working class border-crossers . . . are less interested in celebrating their border crossing than in avoiding precisely the borders which are so deadly dangerous in their lives” (1999, 5). This antithesis of cosmopolitanism is exemplified not only in the story of Shuar who have to dodge bullets and crawl through sewers to get to the United States; it appears in their anxiety and fear as they attempt to cross a security checkpoint to enter the amnh. Their position is certainly a far cry from that of salaried federation authorities who receive visas to travel to international conferences. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Shuar 145

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

wage laborers are just desperate members of a subordinate class. I could not help but see in them a cosmopolitan spirit as they excitedly ran from one museum hall to another, delighted by the diversity of exhibits. I do not, however, believe that this means that, as Appadurai suggests, globalization has turned them into cosmopolitans. Friedman argues that globalization as such is nothing new, not just in European but in human history as a whole (1999, 3).30 For similar reasons Bruno Latour has announced, “We have never been modern” (1993). If a “cosmopolitan” is one who appreciates difference, I believe that the Shuar have always been cosmopolitan (although the scale of their travels and transcultural exchanges certainly has increased dramatically since the formation of the federation; see Helms’s [1988] important challenge to the identification of cosmopolitanism with “the West” or “modernity”). Our experiences in the museum have led me not to doubt this claim; on the contrary, the relative lack of interest in the Shuar and Shuar artifacts on the part of other museumgoers led me to wonder whether people from the core are truly cosmopolitan. As we spent over an hour lingering by the heads and watching people pass by without so much as glancing at the tsantsas, my Shuar companions began to suspect that their own imagining of this ethnoscape was different from that of others. I had hoped (or rather, tried to contrive) encounters between my friends and other visitors, but I had forgotten how strong the invisible walls between people are when so many crowd together in one place. Of the dozens of people who passed the tsantsas, only a few paused to look at them. One of my friends, who knows a few words of English, introduced himself, and I explained who we were. “They are beautiful, yes?” my friend asked. The other visitor looked startled but said “yes.” My friend spoke in Spanish, and I translated: “He says that his grandparents made these, although Shuar no longer hunt heads.” The other visitor said, “Yes, we know.” We stood together for a few more moments, without saying anything, and then the other visitor walked away. My Shuar friends found the apparent passivity of visitors striking. They saw me as a local guide, translating and explaining different exhibits for them, and thought that the South American Hall should provide visitors with Indian guides, who, they felt, would not only provide better 146

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

steven l. rubenstein

explanations of the Amazonian past: their very presence would reveal the Amazonian present—and the evident contrast between the present and the past would demonstrate that Indians such as the Shuar are peoples with history.31 They were sure this would be of profound interest to most visitors. They had not come to the museum, like so many other indigenous peoples since the legislation of nagpra, to protest or argue over who rightfully owns the tsantsas, but they were hopeful for some dialogue about tsantsas. That museumgoers would not even try to engage the Shuar in conversation only reinforced their sense that, even living in New York City, they were still in the West’s periphery. Upon reflection I believe that the awkward mumblings of the other museumgoers—whether out of embarrassment or lack of interest, I do not know—and the strained, inarticulate attempts of my Shuar companions to speak in the language of their host country echo the effective silence that accompanied the return of the nmai tsantsas to the federation. Perhaps the movements of adventurers, anthropologists, Shuar, tourists, and of course tsantsas all exemplify the “modern” ethnoscape Appadurai celebrates. But such moments of silence reveal that the very movements through which the cultural objects of one people diffuse to distant places all around the world, and that bring people from distant parts of the world into close physical proximity, are nevertheless organized around differences—not just cultural but political and economic as well—that push people apart. I remarked earlier that while at the amnh I had concluded that the other museumgoers were not truly cosmopolitan. It is more accurate to say that their cosmopolitanism was of a radically different kind than that of the Shuar. What was at stake here was the way two different groups of people imagine the “ethnoscape” of globalization. Friedman has characterized the cosmopolitan of whom Appadurai speaks as “not primarily one who constantly travels the world, but one who identifies with it in opposition to his or her own locality” (1999, 5, 13). This is not an objective understanding of globalization but a particular ideological stance toward globalization taken by cultural (if not political or economic) elites. Friedman argues that the primary function of this ideology is to obscure and displace global inequalities. It effaces the specific relationship between 147

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

the elite cosmopolitan’s locale and the global, and historical links among different locales in general. I suggest that another effect of this ideology is to reinforce the identification of the core as the center of consumption on a global scale, acknowledging cultural difference only insofar as such difference can be commodified (see Friedman 1999, 9). As Timothy Mitchell (1989) has argued, this ideology has its origins not in the late twentieth century but in late nineteenth-century Europe. What is new about this global ethnoscape is, both Appadurai and Friedman agree, that it is now shared by elites in territories that were once European colonies. As Friedman observes, the globalization of this ideology does not mean that it is now universally shared. Undocumented Shuar wage earners (and perhaps other people from the periphery), for example, exhibit a quite different kind of cosmopolitanism, one that is characterized not by its disidentification from the Shuar’s own territorial and cultural locale, but by an appreciation of difference—spatial and temporal, discursive and material, ethnic and economic. Others have argued that historical knowledge is partial and culturally mediated. I suggest here that people from the core and from the periphery mediate it in radically different ways, that is, we have very different attitudes toward our amnesias. In this the Shuar are strikingly different from other museumgoers, who see “natural history,” a history of the ontological other, and have forgotten the sociological history, the history of the political economy by which these objects came to reside in one building in New York. Thus whenever I ask my students who have seen tsantsas what they think, they ask me, “How did the Shuar make them?” But when I was in the apartment of one of my Shuar friends and over dinner asked my friends what they thought of the museum exhibit, they all wanted to know, “How did our tsantsas end up in New York?” We all forget parts of our past, but some of us want to remember more than others. notes This chapter is based in part on a paper I wrote as a postdoctoral fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and I am grateful for the support and encouragement of the society and its director, Dominick 148

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

LaCapra, as well as the Department of Anthropology and its chair, David Holmberg. That paper was presented at the “Recycling Culture” conference at Cornell, coorganized by Mieke Bal and Michael Steinberg, and I appreciate their invitation to present on this topic. It is also based on a paper I wrote for Kathy Fine-Dare's “American Border Crossings” panel at the 102nd aaa annual meeting; a revised version of that paper was published as “Shuar Migrants and Shrunken Heads, Face to Face in a New York Museum” in Anthropology Today 20 (3), and I benefited from the comments of anonymous reviewers. I would like to thank Miguel Puwáinchir, Felipe Tsenkush, Silverio Jíntiach’, and Marcelino Chúmpi of the Shuar Federation for their support and assistance in my research in Ecuador. I would also like to thank Gail Solomon of the Smithsonian Institution, Nancy Rosoff of the National Museum of the American Indian, and Robert Carneiro and Barbara Mathe of the American Museum of Natural History for their assistance in the research for this article. Several people read drafts of that article and this essay, and I would like to thank them for their helpful comments: Michel Alexiades, Timothy Anderson, Harald Braun, Diane Ciekawy, Kathy Fine-Dare, Les W. Field, Charles Forsdick, Katherine Jellison, Brad Jokisch, Elke Mader, Steve Miner, Daniela Peluso, Marie Perruchon, Nancy Rosoff, Stephen Smith, Angela Torresan, Jackie Wolf, and James A. Zeidler. I am especially grateful for Kathy Fine-Dare’s help and encouragement. Finally, I Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

would like to thank my Shuar friends who accompanied me to the amnh, who must remain nameless. 1. A fundamental issue in anthropology is at stake in this discussion: how do we talk about non-Western peoples, especially groups such as the Shuar? At the time of contact (and conquest), Europeans were struck by differences, but they also looked for similarities. In the first few centuries following the conquest of the Americas, Europeans debated first whether American Indians had a soul (if they did, missionaries could then convert them to Christianity), and then whether American Indians were living in a state of nature. (If they were living in a state of nature, then there was a radical difference between “us,” the “civilized,” and “them,” the “savage.”) In the nineteenth century most anthropologists came to accept that Indians were similar to us, at least insofar as they too have culture. But some, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, also wondered whether they could go further 149

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

in their thinking and conceive of an actual connection between them and Westerners. The language of evolution provided a way to express a connection while recognizing (and explaining) differences. In this discourse Indian cultures represented an earlier stage of cultural evolution. (This mode of thinking is echoed today in the way people contrast “modern” cultures with “traditional” or “primitive” cultures.) In the twentieth century some anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, challenged this evolutionary model and its implication that Westerners were more advanced than the people they had been conquering and colonizing. In the years following World War I, most anthropologists came to share this critique, and today most people recognize not only that Indians are “cultured” but also that their cultures are often quite complex. Although many people still think of them as somehow “more natural” or “closer to nature,” anthropologists strive to avoid such language and the implied evolutionary opposition. For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists were content to study non-Western cultures simply as “different” cultures and tried to understand them in their own terms. Most anthropologists had long ago rejected the language of evolution, not just because of ideological doubts about notions of progress but also because most nineteenth-century evolutionary models were speculative. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

However, we now have many fine historical studies, supplemented by archaeological studies, that help us reconstruct actual changes over the past several hundred years. One result of these trends is that many anthropologists have turned from thinking of “culture” as beliefs and practices shared by a clearly bounded group of people to pay more attention to individual agency and conflicts (over meaning as well as power) within groups. Some anthropologists explicitly invoke Boas in conceptualizing cultural boundaries as porous and cultural traits as fluid. By the late twentieth century, however, anthropologists such as Eric Wolf returned to the question of what might connect seemingly different cultures. Recent studies not only help us understand changes in any particular culture; they also show how changes in one culture can lead to (and be influenced by) changes in another. Clearly, cultures need to be understood in terms of larger, even global, contexts. 150

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

2. World-systems theories argue that the global context within which specific individuals and societies operate has its own cultural logic and social structure. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has proposed the terms “core” and “periphery” as a way to talk about the global structure. Specifically, he characterizes the global market in terms of an unequal division of labor in which low-(or non-)wage-earning workers in “peripheral” countries exchange raw materials and unskilled labor for manufactured goods produced by high-wage-earning people in “core” countries (Wallerstein 1974, 351). The profound insight is that two parts of the world can appear to be radically different (in terms of material wealth, social structure, and values) precisely because they have been in a relationship, each influencing the other. World-systems theorists such as Wallerstein are primarily interested in the relationship between different countries (for example, Spain and Mexico or England and India). Anthropologists have wondered if they could look at relationships between different—even vastly different—cultures in the same way. In his ironically titled Europe and the People without History, the anthropologist Eric Wolf argues that this core-periphery distinction offers a historical explanation for differences between so-called traditional (or primitive) societies and so-called modern societies, and thus provides a productive basis for studying local cultures in global terms (Wolf 1982, 22–3). Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Both Wallerstein and Wolf focus on the emergence of a world system following the European conquest of the Americas. Anthropologist Stephen Kowalewski has argued that “there was never a time without macroregional cultural interaction, without world-systems” (1996, 32), and that archeologists and ethnohistorians should analyze “the systematic properties of its regional parts (as in Wallerstein’s world division of labor) and in terms of ‘emergent properties of the macroregional whole, which might include boundary institutions and the ways in which values are produced, transferred among its component parts, and consumed” (1996, 33; see also Kohl 1987; Schortman and Urban 1987). In a similar vein sociologists Thomas Hall and Christopher Chase-Dunn define a world-system as “intersocietal networks in which the interactions (e.g., trade, warfare, intermarriage, information, etc.) are important for the reproduction of the internal structures of the composite units and more 151

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

importantly affect changes which occur in these local structures,” and argue that from this perspective, core-periphery structures need not be global, and indeed, that such structures have existed in different parts of the world ever since the Neolithic revolution (1996, 12–13). They further identify two kinds of core-periphery structures, one that is “differentiated” in that “societies at different levels of complexity and population density interact,” and one that is “hierarchical” in that “political, economic, or ideological domination exists among different societies within the same core/periphery structure” (15). Prior to the European conquest of the Americas, the Shuar were arguably part of the first kind of core-periphery system; today they are part of the second kind. 3. In emphasizing the importance of relationship I depart from James Clifford’s project of understanding “specific dynamics of dwelling/travelling” comparatively (1997b, 24). I suggest that despite Clifford’s critique of “midtwentieth century disciplinary anthropology” (19), his characterization of “informants” as “travellers” (23) within a specifically comparative framework serves the same function as Boasian and Malinowskian ethnogrephy: to challenge the reader’s own ethnocentric assumptions. The signal contribution of world-systems approaches is its suggestion that what may appear to be different societies or cultures may in fact be Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

unequal parts of a larger system. The comparison of the ways of life and values of people in different parts of the world is subordinate to an understanding of a larger system that is fundamentally about power; the object is to challenge spatially organized (and often culturally disguised) inequality. Clifford acknowledges that “the project of comparison would have to grapple with the evident fact . . . that certain travellers are materially privileged, others oppressed” (1997b, 35) but mentions inequality as just one of many concerns, all subordinate to the larger comparative study of travel. 4. The nmai was legislated in 1989 to absorb the collection of the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian in New York. Its exhibition facility at the U.S. Custom House building in New York, however, did not open until October 30, 1994. In 1998 the nmai had built a Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, and began to move the Heye Foundation’s collection from New York to Suitland in 1999. It would take five years for 152

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

the collections to be moved to the Cultural Resources Center. That year the nmai began constructing another branch in Washington dc, which opened to the public on September 21, 2004. When the legislation establishing the nmai was passed, Congress instructed the Smithsonian Institution to return human remains and associated funerary objects to the descendants of the deceased. The following year this instruction was expanded to apply to all institutions receiving federal funding (except for federal institutions). Much of the content of the nmai and nagpra legislation is virtually identical. 5. It was of crucial importance to the nmai that the federation delegation represented both the Shuar and the Achuar (Nancy Rosoff, pers. comm., 2004). In communications between 1994 and 1995, Felipe Tsenkush signed as the president of the Federación Interprovincial de los Centros ShuarAchuar, although other documents from that time refer only to the Federación Interprovincial de los Centros Shuar (Ramiro Matos, pers. comm., 2004). At the time of the repatriation, Achuar living in Morona Santiago were affiliated with the federation. They have since split off to form their own federation, which maintains amicable relations with the Shuar Federation. 6. Many at the Smithsonian felt Native American archives and museums were Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

necessary preconditions for the return of any objects, which—ironically— the Smithsonian considered loans, that is, the Smithsonian was the owner, and the Indian tribes that originally produced the objects were caretakers (Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson 1993, 545). 7. Previously, the disposition of such objects was governed by the Archeological Resources Protection Act (arpa) of 1979, which protected the access of archeologists to such objects. arpa recognizes the importance of “providing scientific or humanistic understandings of past human behavior, cultural adaptation, and related topics through the application of scientific or scholarly techniques such as controlled observation, contextual measurement, controlled collection, analysis, interpretation, and explanation” (32 Code of Federal Regulations 229.3[a][1] [1998]) and was intended to protect objects from commercial exploitation (U.S. Code 16, sec. 470aa[a][2]) and from private collectors (U.S. Code 16, sec. 470aa[a][4]). 153

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

8. Or an inverted collaboration, as it was the nmai that initiated the return of the heads. 9. Although it is the Shuar who are most famous for having shrunk heads, some of these heads were possibly those of Shuar and had been made into tsantsas by Achuar or others. Harner’s informants claimed that the Shuar taught the art to the Achuar and the Huambisa, who in turn taught it to the Candoshi (1984, 225n4). Descola’s informants “emphatically declared that they never made shrunken heads and that this practice, which they themselves equated with cannibalism, was associated solely with the Shuar,” although Descola argues that the Achuar did make tsantsas several generations earlier (1996, 272). According to Hendricks (citing a personal communication from Pita Kelekna), the Achuar, unlike the Shuar, did not fight in order to capture heads (although they may have cut off and disposed of the heads of slain enemies as a sign of disrespect) (1993, 18). Hendricks does suggest that the Achuar did in fact shrink heads if a Shuar were a member of the raiding party (140, 157). For Hendricks the more significant point is not that the Achuar shrank heads but rather that the ethnic boundary between the Shuar and the Achuar is both empirically and conceptually blurry (18). The distinction between human remains and cultural items is almost Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

as significant as the distinction between the Shuar and the Achuar; repatriated human remains are usually reburied, but repatriated sacred or cultural objects are not. 10. For well over a century, it was only from the point of view of Euro-Americans (especially given the way tsantsas were displayed in museums) that the heads represented “the Jívaro.” But, I believe, it was in part because of this metonymic function that the nmai repatriated the heads to the ShuarAchuar Federation: they recognized the federation as the legitimate representative of the Shuar and, at the time, the Achuar, people. The return of the heads accomplished more than a recognition of the legitimacy of the Shuar Federation; the federation is a relatively new institution that has radically altered Shuar social relations; in this sense the return of the heads could be construed as the restoration of a new political body (see Winans 1994 for a similar case in East Africa). 154

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

11. The tsantsas they saw (or didn’t see) belonged to the National Museum of the American Indian, previously the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. I thank Nancy Rosoff for this account of the Shuar reaction (pers. comm., 1998). 12. The nmai was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress on November 28, 1989, as U.S. Code 20 80q, title 20 (education), chapter 3 (the Smithsonian Institution), sub-chapter 13 (nmai). According to 80q(5), the primary objectives of the act were to (a) create a national institution with unrivaled capability for exhibition and research; (b) give all Americans the opportunity to learn about the cultural legacy, historic grandeur, and contemporary culture of Native Americans; (c) provide facilities for scholarly meetings and the performing arts; (d) make available curatorial and other learning opportunities for Indians; (e) and make possible traveling exhibitions to communities throughout the nation. According to section 80q(3), in addition to two officials of the Smithsonian Institution, twelve of the twenty-three members of the board of trustees shall be Indians. For the purposes of this essay, the most significant sections of the act are 80q(9) through 80q(12), which relate to repatriation. According to 80q(9)(c), “If any Indian human remains are identified by a preponderance of the evidence as those of a particular individual or as

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

those of an individual culturally affiliated with a particular Indian tribe, the Secretary, upon the request of the descendants of such individual or of the Indian tribe shall expeditiously return such remains (together with any associated funerary objects) to the descendants or tribe, as the case may be.” And according to 80q(9)(b), Where cultural affiliation of Native American unassociated funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony has been established in the summary prepared pursuant to subsection (a) of this section, or where a requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show cultural affiliation by a preponderance of the evidence based upon geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical, or other relevant information or expert opinion, then the Smithsonian Institution shall expeditiously return such unassociated funerary object, sacred object, or object of cultural patrimony where—(1) the 155

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

requesting party is the direct lineal descendant of an individual who owned the unassociated funerary object or sacred object; (2) the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show that the object was owned or controlled by the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization; or (3) the requesting Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization can show that the unassociated funerary object or sacred object was owned or controlled by a member thereof, provided that in the case where an unassociated funerary object or sacred object was owned by a member thereof, there are no identifiable lineal descendants of said member or the lineal descendants, upon notice, have failed to make a claim for the object.

These provisions, although not put into practice until 1994, anticipated and provided a template for nagpra. 13. Between 1881 and 1911 population around the Gualaquiza River declined by 50 percent because of local hostilities (Allioni 1911, 12; Bennett Ross 1984). 14. Of course, other factors may be involved. Elizabeth Cruwys has suggested that nagpra itself complicates repatriation, since claims for the repatriation of a wide variety of objects under a wide variety of conditions is now regulated by one piece of legislation and thus is often adjudicated in courts. In

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

contrast, she argues that the legal position regarding the repatriation of archaeological artifacts and human skeletal remains continues to be uncertain and varies between countries. . . . Perhaps this is advantageous both for groups requesting the return of ancestral collections and for archaeologists and anthropologists concerned to preserve the collections in museums for further research and education. . . . It would seem that other museums and institutions should be permitted to make their own decisions, in the same way that ethnic groups are able to make their own claims for the repatriation of specific artifacts, on the basis of informed opinion and negotiation rather than general laws. (Cruwys 1993, 556)

My point, however, is that there was little or no negotiation between the Shuar and the nmai. 15. A.-C. Taylor has suggested that the scattered habitat and dispersed 156

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

settlement pattern of the Shuar protected them from the imperialist and colonialist endeavors of highland states (first Inca, then Spanish) and enabled them to control a huge buffer zone and broker relations between highland states and lowland chiefdoms (1996, 239). 16. All Shuar men could aspire to one or more of the following statuses: uunt (headman; the head of an autonomous extended family including daughters and sons-in-law), uwíshin (shaman), amík (trader), wea (leader of ceremonies, such as those following the shrinking of a head), and kakáram (strongman) (Hendricks 1993, 6). (Women too could aspire to be uwíshin, ujaj—the female counterpart to wea—and their own form of kakáram.) Power was organized through diffuse, fluid, and overlapping networks and alliances; although individual kakáram were able to concentrate considerable power and influence, their power was always vulnerable to challenge, never institutionalized, and could not effectively be inherited by their children. The Shuar traditionally recognized a kakáram in two ways: he spoke in a strong, loud voice, and he was immortal—that is, he could kill but could not be killed (Hendricks 1988, 219, 228). Such power is not intrinsic but acquired in the form of arútam wakaní, which can be glossed as “warrior power” (Harner 1984, 111–12). In the past fathers would often take boys Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

of about eight years on a several-day journey to a waterfall. There the boy would be given maikúa (an infusion from the plant Brugmansia suaveolens or B. aurea), in the hope that he would then see momentary visions (the Shuar also translate this word into Spanish as poder, “power,” reflecting the way the Shuar identify vision with power), or arútam, produced by the soul, or wakaní, of a deceased ancestor (A.-C. Taylor 1993, 661). As long as the arútam wakaní remained attached to the young man’s body, he expressed confidence and intelligence and resisted disease, sorcery, and physical violence. If he acquired additional powers, he was invincible. Because of this strength a kakáram could lead a successful war party and shrink heads with impunity. 17. “Achuar” is a conflation of “Achu Shuar,” meaning “swamp-palm people,” that is, people who live where the swamp palms grow. The Achuar sometimes call the Shuar “Muraiya Shuar,” meaning “hill people,” because the 157

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

Shuar live in the foothills of the Andes. As these names suggest, the major superficial difference between the two groups is the area where they live. In other respects their cultures are similar (Hendricks 1993, 6, 21; see also Descola 1996), and they speak dialects of the same language. Indeed, the most significant effect of difference between the two groups seems simply to be the depth and expression of their former mutual enmity. More significant for the purposes of this essay is the asymmetry in headhunting practices. According to Karsten and Harner, although Shuar will kill other Shuar, they will not shrink the heads of Shuar. From the Shuar point of view, the Achuar were those people whose heads could be shrunk. 18. Most “tsantsas” (though not the ones on actual display) are fakes, testimony to the earlier craze of Euro-Americans to acquire as many tsantsas as possible. Caveat emptor. 19. Similarly, many of the artifacts owned by museums were originally collected by wealthy private citizens. Those who still wanted to see and display their artifacts, but who had run out of room in their own homes or no longer wanted to pay for the insurance, could donate their private collections to a museum. 20. In fact, museum scientists (curators) chose objects only at the insistence of museum administrators. Indeed, the organization of “Expeditions” exCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

pressed goals of administrators that were fundamentally at odds with the goals of curators, who organize their exhibits not only to educate museumgoers about specific cultures but also to place specific cultures in regional contexts, thus calling attention to relationships between neighboring cultures. On the eve of the museum’s 125th anniversary, the administration asked each department to select treasures; the chair of the anthropology department in turn asked each of the curators to designate one specimen as a “treasure.” Rather than nominating tsantsas as one of the treasures, the curator of the South American People’s Hall chose a manikin of a Rikbatsa man, adorned with colorful feathers, because it is located at the far end of the hall. He did this so that visitors in search of this “treasure” would have to pass by and perhaps even look at the other artifacts. This curator was not only trying to manipulate the visitor; he was resisting the administration’s 158

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

notion of a meta-exhibit of spectacular artifacts by reasserting the importance of the geographic context. Conversely, William Grimes, in his article on the fifty treasures (“The Inside Track: On the Trail of 50 Natural History Treasures,” New York Times, April 14, 1995), specifically called attention to the tsantsas, in effect nominating a fifty-first treasure. Of course, there is nothing to stop a visitor from rushing past the heads and out of the hall, intent on collecting the next “treasure.” The space between the institution’s permanent collection and the individual visitor’s “treasure hunt” is thus a political space, where people negotiate and contest what is to be included and excluded. 21. In the New York Times article, William Grimes observed that the “Expedition” was a solution to the problem facing museum visitors, of how to get a sense of the Museum as a whole. But having each visitor use a cd audioguide to design an individualized “expedition” also seems to be a solution to the excessive time and expense required to create a new exhibit. 22. Nina Archabal has argued that museums are “institutions of memory” representing cultural continuity and connection. The challenge of the world system is to refunction museums in the service of a more inclusive and pluralistic community (1998, 33–35). As Mike Wallace has pointed out, however, controversial exhibits such as the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay display Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

reveal that it is “no simple matter to discover who exactly ‘the community’ is. Or who gets to speak for that community. Or what to do when some groups contest the right of other groups to serve as spokespeople” (1996, 285). The world system organizes cultural difference in a context of political and economic inequality, and any attempt to represent a “global community” is necessarily a political act. Michael Ames has thus concluded that “museum policy can no longer make undisputed claims for the privileges of neutrality and universality” (cited in Jones 1993, 211). That each visitor uses a cd audioguide to design an individualized “expedition” seems to solve the museum’s dilemma of representational authority, placing responsibility largely in the hands of individual visitor. The amnh thus reflects the regime of flexible accumulation, bringing “glory to the city” as a site of consumption. By way of contrast the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History is moving to 159

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

react against it, by glorifying the nation as a site that unites production and consumption. Concerned with the “increasing democratization of history and the increasing skepticism about there being something more to truth than just power” (Lobar 1998, 2) and recent exhibits contributing to “the fragmentation of American history and the American public” (4), Steven Lobar, the chair and curator of the Division of the History of Technology, has urged that the museum “turn to a ‘new cultural history’ for a new paradigm of history exhibitions” (5). According to this paradigm “culture is a context for activity and artifacts” that determines “what artifacts meant to the people who made and used them” (5–6). Although Lobar recognizes that cultural contexts “may be shared, partially shared, or contested,” the outer limits of such contexts are national: “the American world view” and “American identity” (6). There is no room in this project for the probability that the people who “made and used” a particular artifact may include different people in different parts of the world who identify themselves differently. Ironically, Lobar’s “new cultural history” is nothing more than Boas’s old cultural anthropology (which has guided the organization of most museums’ exhibition of different cultures, e.g., the Hall of South American Peoples at the amnh), now harnessed to the nationalist project. Of course, one could argue that this is precisely the mandate of the National Museum Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

of American History, but Lobar explicitly presents this approach as an alternative to the current model. Perhaps that model was established at a time when the state felt less threatened by globalization. 23. Grimes, “Inside Track,” c 12. 24. Some scholars identify this migration from the periphery to the core as a new movement of transnational migration identified with postindustrial capitalism and globalization and distinguish it from the overlapping waves of movement following the initial colonization of the New World and the industrial revolution. The first movement was primarily intranational, from the countryside of emerging European nation-states to burgeoning centers of industrial activity. The second movement was from semiperipheral regions of Europe to burgeoning industrial centers in the New World. (Glick Schiller divides this movement into two waves, the first primarily in the nineteenth century, when New World nation-states emerged and con160

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

solidated, and the second primarily in the twentieth century, resulting from the break-up of Europe’s African and Asian colonies and the rise of the United States as a global power [1999, 99–109].) The third movement, coeval with the second, was of “contract laborers of diverse origins to the expanding mines and plantations of the tropics” (Wolf 1982, 362–63). Each of these movements typically led to the permanent settlement of immigrants in new colonies or countries. Postindustrial transnational migration is comprised largely of people from the periphery journeying to the core, often with unclear or insecure legal status, in search of wage labor. These migrants often maintain political and economic ties with their home countries (such that in many cases remittances constitute a significant contribution to the home country’s wealth and are an important source of capital; in some cases migrants constitute a potent political force in their home countries) and typically plan to return to their native homes in the future (Faist 2000; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1992; Levitt 2001; Portes, Haller, and Guarnizo 2002; Sassen 1996; see Glick Schiller 1999 and Massey 1999 for reviews of these recent trends in migration and in the study of migration). Recently, however, scholars have called attention to the “transnational” dimensions, that is, enduring ties to their original homelands, of migrants Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

in earlier movements (Glick Schiller and Fouron 1990; Foner 1997; Kearney 1991; Rouse 1989). Some (e.g., Kivisto 2001) have suggested that every movement of migrants, including this most recent one, begins with a period of instability in which transnational elements are developed and maintained, until migrants begin settling permanently in their new homes, and that the transnational dimensions of postindustrial migrants coincide with processes of acculturation and assimilation into their host countries. Be that as it may, contemporary Shuar migrants to the United States are deeply involved in transnational networks and do plan to return to Ecuador. For these reasons I believe they have more in common with Up de Graff and Clark than with those people (primarily from Europe and Asia) who moved permanently to the United States around the same times that Up de Graf and Clark made their journeys south. 25. This is common to immigrants dreaming of America; when my great161

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

grandparents voyaged from Russia and Hungary to the United States, they were motivated in part by fantasies of the goldena medinah, the “golden land”; several educational Web sites use the phrase “the streets were paved with gold” to express the hopes of immigrants, for example the Winter 2005 edition of Meridian: A Middle School Computer Technologies Journal (a service of nc State University, Raleigh nc) 8 (1), http://www.ncsu.edu/ meridian/sum2002/fieldtrip/ (accessed January 3, 2009) and Today’s Teacher: Innovative Teaching Concepts, http://www.todaysteacher.com/EllisIsland WebQuest/gatewaytodreams.htm#Introduction (accessed January 3, 2009). 26. In this discussion I am not concerned with the distinction between history and memory. I accept Maurice Halbwachs’s distinction between historical memory, which is mediated by artifacts and texts and thus indirect, and autobiographical memory, which is direct (see Coser 1992, 23–24). Nevertheless, he does not categorically oppose memory and history. He argues that “memory” always involves social processes and has a collective dimension. Even autobiographical memories, however, are by no means solipsistic: they are “always rooted in other people” and tend “to fade unless . . . periodically reinforced through contact with persons with whom one shared the experiences in the past” (Coser 1992, 24). “History” is one kind of institutionalized collective memory. Historical memory, for examCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

ple, is “kept alive” not only through written records but also “through commemorations, festive enactment, and the like” (Coser 1992, 23). Whether historical or autobiographical, Halbwachs argues, the past is recalled and reconstructed through social frameworks (Halbwachs 1992, 38, 53). To this argument I would add that the social processes by which memories and frameworks for remembrance are instituted not only play a crucial role in constituting “history” as an object one may or may not have, or know; they also play a decisive role in constituting the subject of history, that is, the person or people who “have” history. To foreshadow a suggestion in the conclusion of this article, I believe Halbwachs’s approach also raises the possibility that there may exist social frameworks for collective forgetting. In other words, it is not that “history” itself, in the form of written texts or museum displays, competes with or replaces “memory” as such. Rather, certain kinds of history, like discourses 162

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

(Foucault 1978), are props in a social process that in part function to institutionalize certain collective memories while displacing or obscuring others. 27. The Shuar tsantsas were exhibited among artifacts of other cultures because the curator needed “to represent all of Amazonian Indian culture in [only] 8,000 square feet” (Robert Carneiro, pers. comm., 2006). 28. Indeed, some Shuar read these ethnographies as being about their own “periphery,” that is, the Achuar who live to the east and at lower elevations, and far from centers of state power or markets. Many Shuar who live along the colonization frontier have compared the way of life of their own grandparents to that of contemporary Achuar. In contrast to Westerners, who transform spatial distance into temporal difference (for example, identifying peoples in recently explored or colonized areas as their “contemporary ancestors”), Shuar thus transform temporal distance into spatial difference (identifying their own ancestors with their distant neighbors). 29. With the phrase “empty meeting grounds,” I borrow from, and pay tribute to, Dean MacCannell’s claim that the world is now structured by an “emerging dialectic between two ways of being-out-of-place. One pole is a new synthetic arrangement of life which releases human creativity. The other is a new form of authority, containment of creativity, and control” (1992, 5). 30. Hall and Chase-Dunn (1996) and Kowalewski (1996) have argued that preCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

historic globalizations were further organized along core-periphery structures. Anthropologist Randall H. McGuire has argued that the application of Wallerstein’s framework to prehistory is usually inappropriate, because world-systems approaches rely on an “idea of bounded, nested, spatial units that is a creation of modern history,” whereas in many prehistoric cases, “the boundaries between social groups are ill-defined and very fuzzy.” Moreover, macroregional systems may not have one core: different interacting groups within a region may independently function as centers of religious, social, economic, or political relations (1996, 60). Ironically, McGuire is characterizing prehistoric macroregional systems in much the same way as Appadurai characterizes globalization, albeit at a smaller scale. If anything, I believe that these prehistoric conditions are more likely to promote cosmopolitanism than the modern world system. 31. Similar thinking was one of the motives for the nmai (see note 4). 163

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

references Ackerman, Douglas W. 1997–98. Kennewick Man: The meaning of “cultural affiliation” and “major scientific benefit” in the Native American graves protection and repatriation act. Tulsa Law Journal 33:359–83. Allioni, Miguel. 1911. The Shuara, an Indian savage tribe of Ecuador. On file at the New York Public Library. American Museum of Natural History. 1995. Fact sheet. In Expedition: Treasures from 125 years of discovery. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Ames, Michael M. 1986. Museums, the public, and anthropology: A study in the anthropology of anthropology. Ranchi Anthropology Series 9. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press; New Delhi: Concept. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Archabal, Nina. 1998. Museums and sustainable communities. Museum News (September/October): 31–35. Bal, Mieke. 1992. Telling, showing, showing off. Critical Inquiry 18 (3): 556– 94. Bashkow, Ira. 2004. A neo-Boasian conception of cultural boundaries. American Anthropologist 106 (3): 443–85.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Bennett Ross, Jane. 1984. Effects of contact on revenge hostilities among the Achuara Jívaro. In Warfare, culture, and environment, ed. R. B. Ferguson, 83–124. Orlando: Academic Press. Bunker, Stephen G. 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, unequal exchange, and the failure of the modern state. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bunzl, Matti. 2004. Boas, Foucault, and the “native anthropologist”: Notes toward a neo-Boasian anthropology. American Anthropologist 106 (3): 435–42. Burkhalter, S., and R. Murphy. 1989. Tappers and sappers: Rubber, gold and money among the Mundurucu. American Ethnologist 16 (1): 100–116. Clark, Leonard. 1953. The rivers ran east. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Clifford, James. 1988. The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. ———. 1991. Four Northwest Coast museums. In Exhibiting cultures: The 164

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

poetics and politics of museum display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 212–54. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press. ———. 1997a. Museums as contact zones. In Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century, 188–219. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997b. Traveling cultures. In Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century, 17–46. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Coser, Lewis A. 1992. Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs, 1877–1945. In On collective memory, by Maurice Halbwachs. Ed. and trans. Lewis Coser, 1–24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cruwys, Elizabeth. 1993. Comments on “The return of the Ahayu:da.” Current Anthropology 34 (5): 523–55. Descola, Philippe. 1996. The spears of twilight. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: New Press. Faist, Thomas. 2000. Transnationalization of international migration: Implications for the study of citizenship and culture. Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (2): 189–222. Feest, Christian F. 1993. Comments on “The return of the Ahayu:da.” Current Anthropology 34 (5): 83–124. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

movement and nagpra. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fisher, William H. 2000. Rainforest exchanges: Industry and community on an Amazonian frontier. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press. Foner, Nancy. 1997. What’s new about transnationalism? New York immigrants today and at the turn of the century. Diaspora 6 (3): 355–75. Foucault, Michel. 1978. An introduction. Vol. 1 of The history of sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. Friedman, Jonathan. 1999. Indigenous struggles and the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Australian Journal of Anthropology 10 (1): 1–14. Glick Schiller, Nina. 1999. Transmigration and nation-states: Something old and something new in the U.S. immigrant experience. In The handbook of international migration: The American experience, ed. C. Hirschman, P. Kasinitz, and J. DeWind, 94–119. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Glick Schiller, Nina, and G. Fouron. 1990. “Everywhere we go, we are in 165

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

danger”: Ti Manno and the emergence of a Haitian transnational identity. American Ethnologist 17 (2): 329–47. Glick Schiller, Nina, L. Basch, and C. Szanton Blanc. 1992. Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. In Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered, ed. Nina Glick Schiller, L. Basch, and C. Szanton Blanc, 1–24. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Gow, Peter. 1994. River people: Shamanism and history in western Amazonia. In Shamanism, history, and the state, ed. N. Thomas and C. Humphrey, 90–113. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 6–23. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On collective memory. Ed. and trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, Thomas D., and Christopher Chase-Dunn. 1996. Comparing world-systems: Concepts and hypotheses. In Pre-Columbian world systems, ed. Peter N. Peregrine and Gary M. Feinman, 11–26. Madison wi: Prehistory Press. Harner, Michael. 1984. Jívaro: People of the sacred waterfalls. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Helms, Mary. 1988. Ulysses’ sail: An ethnographic odyssey of power, knowledge, and geographic distance. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Hendricks, Janet Wall. 1988. Power and knowledge: Discourse and ideological transformation among the Shuar. American Ethnologist 15 (2): 216–38. ———. 1993. To drink of death. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Jokisch, Brad. 2001. Desde Nueva York a Madrid: Tendencia en la migración ecuatoriana. Debate 54:59–80. Jones, Anna Laura. 1993. Exploding canons: The anthropology of museums. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 22:201–20. Jones, Gareth D., and Robyn J. Harris. 1998. Archeological human remains: Scientific, cultural, and ethical considerations. Current Anthropology 39 (2): 253–64. 166

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

Karsten, Rafael. 1935. The head-hunters of western Amazonas: The life and culture of the Jibaro Indians of eastern Ecuador and Peru. Commentationes Humanarum Littararum 7, no. 1. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Kearney, Michael. 1991. Borders and boundaries of the state and self at the end of empire. Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (1): 52–74. Kivisto, Peter. 2001. Theorizing transnational immigration: A critical review of current efforts. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (4): 549–77. Kohl, Philip. 1987. The use and abuse of world-systems theory. In Advances in archeological method and theory, ed. M. B. Schiffer, 1–35. Vol. 11. San Diego: Academic Press. Kowalewski, Stephen A. 1996. Clout, corn, copper, core-periphery, culture area. In Pre-Columbian world systems, ed. Peter N. Peregrine and Gary M. Feinman, 27–38. Madison wi: Prehistory Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. [1955] 1973. Tristes tropiques. Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. London: Penguin Books. Levitt, Peggy. 2001. Transnational migration: Taking stock and future directions. Global Networks 1 (3): 195–216. Lobar, Steven. 1998. Toward a new “public history” at nmah. Grapevine (31): 1–6. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Logan, J. 2001. The new Latinos: Who they are, where they are. Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research. http://mumford1 .dyndns.org/cen2000/report.html (accessed April 15, 2007). MacCannell, Dean. 1982. Empty meeting grounds: The tourist papers. London: Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw. [1922] 1984. Argonauts of the western Pacific. Prospect Heights il: Waveland. Massey, Douglas S. 1999. Why does immigration occur? A theoretical synthesis. In The handbook of international migration: The American experience, ed. C. Hirschman, P. Kasinitz, and J. DeWind, 34–52. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. McGuire, Randall H. 1996. The limits of world-systems theory for the study of pre-history. In Pre-Columbian world systems, ed. Peter N. Peregrine and Gary M. Feinman, 51–64. Madison wi: Prehistory Press. 167

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

Merrill, William L., Edmund J. Ladd, and T. J. Ferguson. 1993. The return of the Ahayu:da. Current Anthropology 34 (5): 83–124. Mitchell, Timothy. 1989. The world as exhibition. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1): 217–36. Murphy, Yolanda, and Robert F. Murphy. 1985. Women of the forest. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Portes, Alejandro, Wm. Haller, and L. E. Guarnizo. 2002. Transnational entrepreneurs: An alternative form of immigrant economic adaptation. American Sociological Review 67:278–98. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge. Ridington, Robin. 1993. A sacred object as text: Reclaiming the sacred pole of the Omaha tribe. American Indian Quarterly 17 (1): 83–99. Riegel, H. 1996. Into the heart of irony: Ethnographic exhibitions and the politics of difference. In Theorizing museums: Representing identity and diversity in a changing world, ed. S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe, 83–104. Sociological Review Monograph Series. Oxford: Blackwell. Rose, Jerome C., T. Green, and V. Green. 1996. nagpra is forever: Osteology and the repatriation of skeletons. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:81–103. Rouse, Roger. 1989. Mexican migration to the United States: Family relations Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

in the development of a transnational migrant circuit. PhD diss., Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. Rubenstein, Steven. 2001. Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian state. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (3): 263–93. ———. 2006. A head for adventure. In Tarzan was an eco-tourist . . . and other tales in the anthropology of adventure, ed. Luis A. Vivanco and Robert A. Gordon, 235–54. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2007. Circulation, accumulation, and the power of Shuar shrunken heads. Cultural Anthropology 22 (3): 357–99. Salazar, Ernesto. 1981. The Federación Shuar and the colonization frontier. In Cultural transformations and ethnicity in modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 589–613. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sassen, Saskia. 1996. Losing control? Sovereignty in an age of globalization. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. 168

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

steven l. rubenstein

Schortman, Edmund, and Patricia Urban. 1987. Modeling interregional interaction in prehistory. In Advances in archeological method and theory, ed. M. B. Schiffer, 37–95. Vol. 11. San Diego: Academic Press. Sider, Gerald. 1987. When parrots learn to talk, and why they can’t: Domination, deception, and self-deception in Indian-white relations. Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1): 3–23. Steel, Daniel. 1999. Trade goods and Jívaro warfare: The Shuar, 1850–1957, and the Achuar, 1940–1978. Ethnohistory 46 (4): 745–76. Stewart, Susan. 1993. On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Tabah, Agnes. 1993. Native American collections and repatriation. Washington dc: American Association of Museums. Taylor, Anne-Christine. 1993. Remembering to forget: Identity, mourning and memory among the Jívaro. Man 28 (4): 653–78. ———. 1996. The western margins of Amazonia from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. In The Cambridge history of the native peoples of the Americas, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 188–256. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Peter. 1999. Modernities: A geohistorical interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Taylor, Peter, M. J. Watts, and R. J. Johnston. 1995. Remapping the world: What sort of map? What sort of world? In Geographies of global change: Remapping the world in the late twentieth century, ed. R.J. Johnston, P. J. Taylor, and M. J. Watts, 377–85. Oxford: Blackwell. Torgovnick, Marianna. 1990. Gone primitive. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. Richard Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Tsosie, Rebecca. 1999. Privileging claims to the past: Ancient human remains and contemporary cultural values. Arizona State Law Journal 31 (2): 583–677. Up de Graff, F. W. 1923. Head hunters of the Amazon: Seven years of exploration and adventure. New York: Duffield. 169

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

crossing boundaries with shrunken heads

Vizenor, Gerald. 1986. Bone courts: The rights and narrative representation of tribal bones. American Indian Quarterly 10:319–31. Wallace, Mike. 1996. Mickey Mouse history and other essays on American memory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The modern world system. New York: Academic Press. Winans, Edgar V. 1994. The head of the king: Museums and the path to resistance. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (2): 221–41. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

California Press.

170

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

6. Local Conflict, Global Forces Fighting for Public Education in a New York Suburb

jean n. scandlyn I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

What could be more local, more bounded, and more provincial than a fight over the school budget? In an edited volume on transnational border crossings in the Americas, a chapter analyzing the fight over the publicschool budget in a small suburban community outside New York City, which I call Mayfield, might seem incongruous and irrelevant, or at best tangential to the topic at hand.1 But this case is a tangent in the way that borders are themselves tangents, because it calls into question the social categories of native and newcomer, indigenous and colonizer that have been central to the discourse of transcultural and transnational encounters in the Americas. While those of us in the academic community are busy challenging these binary oppositions and identifying their dangers, actors in local communities throughout the Americas are using them to create, protect, and maintain social structures of class and identity. To understand that boundaries are organized at different, nested scales, we must cross the borders of our own conceptions that restrict claims to being native and indigenous to Indian communities in the United States and Canada or to locations south of the U.S. border. In addressing these issues and how actors use these concepts in everyday practice, borders and tangents are critical phenomena for analysis.

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

Borders and boundaries are the defining characteristics of that quintessentially American landscape, the suburb. In a nation that prides itself on the absence of boundaries—of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion—suburbs are the sites where boundaries, both physical and social, are drawn and fiercely defended. John R. Stilgoe aptly titles his history of the origins of the American suburb Borderland and prefaces it with this quote by Susan Cooper, a nineteenth-century commentator on the then newly emerging suburb: “We are the borderers of civilization in America, but borderers of the nineteenth century, when all distances are lessened, whether moral or physical” (1988, frontispiece). Cooper could have been speaking today, for the suburb, neither rural nor urban, still stands at the boundary between them. Historian Kenneth Jackson (1985) describes suburbs as the “crabgrass frontier,” that ragged edge between agricultural land and urban density filled with individually owned houses set on relatively large lawns. Cell phones, the Internet, and air travel further close the distances Susan Cooper describes, not only to the city they surround but to other parts of the Americas and the world. Thus the American suburb is one of the most important and primary contact zones in our contemporary, globalized world. Mary Louise Pratt defines the contact zone as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (1999). The school-board meeting, precisely because it is prosaic, richly symbolic, and steeped in ritual, represents a complex contact zone where native-born residents and newcomers meet and clash, transforming those rituals and symbols to represent current realities of power and privilege, class and ethnicity. As a buffer between rural and urban landscapes, the suburb blends elements of both: houses that protect residents from the forces of nature; lawns, shrubs, and trees tamed to a human aesthetic (Duncan and Duncan 1997); and families bound by the “natural” drives of procreation and emotional attachment.2 The comments of Mary King, a young mother who moved to another town in the county where she considers the public schools to be better than Mayfield’s, reflect this subtle naturalization of 172

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

social relations: “We lived on Riverside Avenue in the village. It was a very nice block—very close knit with lots of kids and a few old people. One of my neighbors was fourth-generation Mayfield. It was a very warm family atmosphere. There were always kids on the block, but it seemed that every year there were more and more. I hated to leave Mayfield, because I think that it’s hard to find that in most suburbs, where you are more isolated.” Mary’s comment and the tone of the conversation in which it arose reveal an important contradiction in middle-class residents’ attitudes about the suburbs. On the one hand, she notes that the warmth and closeness she found in Mayfield is “hard to find,” but her emphasis on this characteristic of social relations shows that her ideal model of the suburb includes social cohesiveness. A sense of community in the suburbs is both natural and expected and, surprisingly, hard to find. The contradiction is subtle and largely unexamined. Like the assertion that all Mayfielders are middle class and thus, presumably, English speaking and native born, the naturalization of community solidarity allows residents to live with diversity along many lines while maintaining their ideal image of their village. Metaphorically, the suburb is a haven that uses nature for solace, privacy, and comfort while providing shelter from its often harsh elements (Jackson 1985; Stilgoe 1988). By marking the physical landscape between city and country, the suburb also naturalizes the social distinctions it creates between landholder and worker, native and immigrant. Nancy G. Duncan and James S. Duncan (1997) refer to this as the “aesthetic ideology of nature.” The aesthetic ties the organization of the landscape to concepts of the beauty of wilderness and stewardship over the natural environment and thus obscures the very real social and economic disparities embedded through private ownership of property. These qualities make the suburb a powerful and complex symbol and feature of American culture. By “American” culture I refer to that of the United States because, with Canada, its spatial organization and cultural heritage differ significantly from other locations in the Americas. The intellectual elite may revile the suburb as a cultural wasteland mired in the maudlin sentiments of family, but immigrants and upwardly mobile native-born residents 173

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

alike may actively seek it as a marker of their arrival into the American middle class, of what Sherry Ortner calls their “class project,” that is, class as a project, “something that is always being made or kept or defended, feared or desired” (2003, 13–14). Young families value it as a safe and affordable place to raise their children. More significantly, the suburb is the dominant form of settlement in the United States. In the 2000 census just over 60 percent of the country’s population claimed a suburban community as “home” (Musbach 2002). Despite this fact few anthropologists have deemed the American suburb an appropriate field site.3 In part this reflects a long-standing bias among American intellectuals, anthropologists included, that suburbs are “culture-less” (Gans 1967).4 It may also result from the difficulty of critically examining communities similar to those in which American-born or raised anthropologists may have grown up or currently live. The suburbs are not, of course, without culture. One feature of that culture, particularly in suburbs created through the incorporation of municipalities that were previously more independent of the central city, is the discourse surrounding who is a native, who can claim the town as their own, and who should define its character. Perhaps living the past ten years in Colorado has made me stop dismissing out of hand and look seriously at the claims of those residents of European descent who proudly display “Native” license plates. They, too, frequently view themselves as “under siege” from a host of invaders ranging from newly arrived immigrants from Latin America to upper-middle-class migrants from the city. Media accounts reinforce the binary opposition of natives and immigrants with stories that characterize the immigration as “new” when in fact, for the community described here, immigration has been a key characteristic for several centuries.5 Though residents of the town use similar oppositions when it suits their interests to do so, they are aware of and express a more complex view of the demographic, social, and political changes that played out in the school-budget crisis. This is not to equate their claims with those of groups that have been marginalized and oppressed for centuries by colonialism and neocolonialism, but to recognize that these oppositions have been integrated 174

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

into the political discourse in complex and subtle ways within our own borders. Historian John Higham (1972) argues that in the United States nativist movements have followed major national crises. Although Mayfield’s school-budget crisis was minor on a national scale, it was a crisis for this community and reflected a larger regional and national pattern of retrenchment from investment in public institutions and a changing economic base. I am suggesting not that we now see the middle- and upper-middle-class residents of Mayfield as victims but rather that taking the discourse seriously opens new ways to explore the complex dynamics of power whose manifestations are rooted in previous waves of immigration and previous encounters between natives and newcomers. In this essay I present a case study of a suburb of New York City that, because it embodies the conflicts and contradictions inherent in constructing boundaries in a society that eschews them, is typically American. The stereotypical suburb depicted in popular media is a place of stable marriages, families with young children, unlocked doors, blind conformity to standards of public behavior, and the absence of conflict. An ethnographic study of conflict management in an American suburb (Baumgartner 1988) suggests that there is some truth behind the stereotype: the open expression of conflict is actively avoided and suppressed in suburban communities. Underlying the stereotype is the assumption, stated by one of my informants, that “we are all middle-class here.” Whereas Mayfield shares many features with the stereotypical suburb, it diverges from that stereotype (as do most suburbs) by being neither bounded, self-contained, nor free of conflict. During the period of my fieldwork, from 1989 to 1992, the community engaged in a round of hotly debated elections over the public-school budget. At the same time, immigrants from Latin America moved directly to Mayfield in significant numbers, constituting 34 percent of the population in 1990, an increase of 50 percent in just ten years (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980, 1990).6 Analysis of the school-budget crisis in Mayfield reveals two key aspects of immigration in the United States. First, because immigration plays an important role in establishing and maintaining class structure, it also contributes to the social construction of ethnic and racial differences. I 175

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

argue that the significant differences in Mayfield are not ethnic and racial but those of social class, despite the fact that Mayfielders (whether newly arrived or native born) rarely explain social dynamics in terms of class differences. Suburbs are primarily residential communities based on the ownership of private property. Real-estate values are significantly affected by the perceived quality of the public schools, schools that are financed through property taxes. For most Americans home ownership is their primary source of wealth. Thus the convergence of wealth, property, taxes, and education demands a materialist analysis of social class. Furthermore, class divisions are also bound to differences in age and generation, as these reflect changes in wealth and opportunity that occur over the life cycle and historical changes in class composition in the United States. Here Ortner’s concept of the “class/race/ethnicity nexus” (2003, 51) is useful. Public discourse in the United States (and in Mayfield) renders social class invisible, its social consequences hidden, as Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb observed in The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972). Discourses of race and ethnicity, however, though not reducible to class, contain within them displaced references to class distinctions. Second and most important for this volume, Mayfield’s school-budget crisis reveals the way immigrants are assimilated into the political structure of receiving communities. Studies of new immigrants understandably focus on their role as workers finding their way in the American economy. When their role in the political sphere is discussed, it is generally in terms of national immigration policy. Though they may not own property or vote in local elections, new immigrants play an important role in public debates over school finances as proxies for the class-based interests of native-born Mayfielders. Middle-class parents, anxious over the quality of their children’s education, argued that the presence of so many newly arrived, non-English speaking immigrant children demanded small classes. Senior citizens, worried that their property taxes would go up, argued that new immigrants could learn English best through immersion as they and their parents had. Immigrants arrive in Mayfield for many reasons, some of which include strategies to complete their own class projects, which may be 176

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

measured in the United States or in their home country or both. Thus their efforts to maintain or improve their class standing through immigrating to Mayfield may also be used by native-born residents in their efforts to maintain or improve their own class standing. Therefore, long before they may have the confidence, resources, or legal standing to play a direct role in formal U.S. politics, new immigrants are assimilated into American political life. Although Americanist anthropologists have made significant contributions to the study of immigration from the immigrants’ point of view, they have not examined with the same degree of attention the response and perspective of receiving communities and their residents.7 But without examining the practices and institutions of elites, in this case those who are the most significant actors in local school and village politics, the puzzle remains incomplete (Marcus 1986). As Laura Nader asserts, “the quality of life and our lives themselves may depend upon the extent to which citizens understand those who shape attitudes and actually control institutional structures” (1974, 284). Both immigrants and receiving communities are actors in the process of assimilation. The method used here, the community study, is a product of the period in anthropology when cultures were conceived as ahistorical, bounded, and homeostatic systems. Yet I apply this method to an atypical field site: a suburb with a long history that lies just outside and intimately connected to one of the world’s most active global cities, New York (Sassen 1991). The community study offers an integrated approach that examines the use of language and rhetoric, symbols and ritual, and social, political, and economic organization to understand a prominent local conflict. Because public education is a highly charged and contested topic in a society that values individual initiative, assimilation of immigrants, and equality of opportunity, it can never be a completely local issue. Nor is it possible to understand the school-budget conflict in Mayfield without considering the village’s place in the transnational flow of migrants in the Americas (Foner 1987, 2000). Thus this chapter addresses questions central to Americanist ethnography: “What is the nature of locality, as a lived experience . . . in a globalized, deterritorialized world?” (Appadurai 1991, 196). It can be viewed 177

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

as a “critical tale” (Lamphere 1992) that addresses the questions: What is a border in a world where people, goods, ideas, and technology can move so quickly across oceans and continents? How are borders constructed and maintained? How are they crossed and transgressed? These questions interest anthropologists, but they are also topics actively debated among the residents of Mayfield.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the study of location I report here the findings of a community study based on observations and in-depth formal and informal interviews with residents made over a period of four years.8 It is necessarily a partial view, limited by my own place in the village’s social structure, residents’ willingness to share their points of view, and the complexity of social interaction in any group of human beings. Mayfield is not on the other side of the world but twenty-five miles from New York City, easily accessible by car or commuter train. In 1992 I presented my findings to members of the community. Individuals I interviewed could read my dissertation and freely offered their comments and criticisms when they did. Nor do I claim to be an impartial observer. Unlike many anthropologists I did not travel to my field site. I lived in Mayfield for ten years and took residence there before ever considering it as a site for research. It is where my two children were born and started school; where I exchanged confidences, childcare, and flour with neighbors; where I worked in a local clinic; and where I made lasting friendships. I entered graduate school with the explicit purpose of doing “insider” or “native” anthropology; I wanted to apply the perspectives and methods of anthropology to the study of my own society and culture. Although my initial goal was to look at healthcare delivery, the school-budget crisis caught my attention and would not let me go. In that sense the topic chose me. In the ten years I lived there, I was continuously struck by Mayfield’s natural beauty. Set on rolling hills that rise steeply from the West River, the village affords sweeping vistas of wooded ridges and rocky cliffs. It is a town noted for its old, large trees in a county filled with old trees. On the north the village is bounded by the West River, while to the south, 178

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

rising hills and a private estate converted to a public park separate it from neighboring villages. A large interstate highway runs across its western border, and to the east a hospital and country club mark the boundary with the next town. This part of the county, partially isolated between hillside and river, is its more rustic, less-developed side. In part because of the limited flat land along the river and in part because the river itself provides a corridor of transportation, there is only one two-lane highway that runs east-west through the village, linking it to the city to the west and the countryside to the east. The obstacles, both political and physical, to widening this route along its full length curb development. Although there are pockets of poverty in this part of the county, for the most part real-estate agents and tour guides describe the villages along the river as quaint and bohemian, home to artists and writers and filled with colorful history.9 What I call Mayfield is actually two contiguous villages, Mayfield and East Mayfield, with a combined population at the time of my fieldwork of approximately nineteen thousand.10 They lie in the first ring of suburban counties outside New York City. Although they are separate towns with their own municipal governments and services, you can pass from one to the next without realizing you have crossed a boundary. The unified public-school district, which consolidated both towns’ schools in 1949, ended a long-standing rivalry whose battles took place on the town’s impeccably maintained football fields. Many of the senior citizens I interviewed regaled me with stories of pranks played on opposing-team members and their fans and of Romeo-and-Juliet love stories that ended, unlike their tragic counterparts, in longstanding marriages. Comments by longtime residents characterize East Mayfield as predominantly working class and the less affluent of the two villages, and Mayfield as the one with pretensions to more solidly middle-class standing. Again this illustrates the nested and shifting nature of boundaries for native-born residents. East Mayfield and Mayfield have distinct political and administrative boundaries, but their class and ethnic boundaries are complex. They are crossed by newcomers, both immigrant and nonimmigrant, who are not aware of historical rivalries between the towns, and policed by the old guard of 179

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

native-born but second- and third-generation immigrants, who remember and invoke that separate history. Driving along Mayfield’s main street or through the subdivisions scaling the hills above the river, you will see a typical middle-class bedroom community with winding, tree-lined streets, broad lawns, and single-family houses. A few multistoried apartment buildings line the main street, and there is a 7-Eleven on one corner, a chain drugstore in the middle of the central commercial block, and two national-brand gas stations near the intersection with the interstate. The small grocery store on Main Street resembles a city market, a franchise of a New York City chain that was purchased by a Korean family in the early 1990s. The majority of the stores are small, privately owned shops selling antiques, gifts, office supplies, pizza and deli sandwiches, or books with names that refer to local events and sites. Professional offices for lawyers, doctors, and dentists occupy converted Victorian houses or the space above stores. Historical markers identify Mayfield’s role in the Revolutionary War, and carved wooden signs call attention to its colonial-era mill site and graveyard. In this respect Mayfield is like many other suburbs throughout the country, tied to the global economy of commodity extraction and marketing, the transnational movement of labor, the national and regional movement of goods and services, and the marketing of local history and distinction. Mayfield has a long history, and many inhabitants take pride in their knowledge of local historical sites and events. The area along the river was initially inhabited by Weckquaesgeck Indians, who practiced horticulture and used the river and tributary streams for fishing, trading, and transportation.11 In the 1600s the Dutch established large agricultural estates on lands granted by the Crown. They, too, used the river for transportation and the streams that emptied into it to power grain mills and other industry. Ferries carried passengers across the river, and steamboats carried them to the city and beyond. In 1899 this site was chosen for the establishment of what would be by 1995 the oldest continually operating automobile assembly plant in the United States. The proposed closing of this plant in 1995 played a key role in the school-budget crisis. Associated with the plant are related tool-and-die operations, and lining 180

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

the street that leads from the plant to the highway are delis, bars, and pizza restaurants that cater to the plant’s workers. Beside the river is an active industrial zone, with trucks carrying fuel oil, machine parts, new cars, and concrete to surrounding towns and cities. Though this picture contradicts images of suburbs as exclusively bedroom communities for commuters, it is characteristic of what Jackson (1985) calls the “railroad suburb” that developed along commuter rail lines in large northeastern cities in the late 1800s. At first Mayfield attracted wealthy industrialists, who did not need to worry about regular commuting to the city. They built large estates on the tops of the hills overlooking the river known as “Millionaire’s Colony.” By 1849 Mayfield had a commuter railroad line running along the river that carried a growing number of middle-class managers to and from city offices. In the subdivision where I lived, the oldest houses dated from this period. Despite the ideology that supported suburban development as offering an antidote to the crowding, dirt, poverty, and immigrants of the city, railroad suburbs such as Mayfield also attracted immigrants and workers (Jackson 1985; Stilgoe 1988). Mayfield’s strong industrial base exaggerated this socioeconomic mix. Beside the river’s industrial zone is an area composed of large, multistoried brick apartment buildings and multifamily frame houses. In the early 1900s this area had its own shopping area frequented by the European immigrants and African American workers who lived in what I call the “inner village.” Most residents were renters, and the density here approached levels comparable to those in Manhattan. Old-time residents who grew up in this part of town described it as rough and tumble, full of life and of the diversity of immigrants speaking Italian, Polish, and German or English with an Irish brogue. The Catholic churches reflected this diversity: in the heart of East Mayfield near the automobile plant was one church for the Irish that later changed to serve Slavic-speaking Eastern Europeans and one on the edge of the inner village for the Italians. The presence of immigrants and laborers has long been at odds with the ideology of suburban development. Elites have sought to control their presence through the control of space. Though many of Mayfield’s Italian 181

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

and Irish immigrants came to the town to build roads and stone walls and landscape for wealthy industrialists, one of Mayfield’s most prominent millionaires disliked seeing a worker’s settlement from his estate and purchased the buildings so that he could tear them down. In the 1960s, as in other parts of the country, the movement for urban renewal arrived in Mayfield. Older housing units and commercial buildings by the river were razed and replaced with high-rise, low-rent, subsidized apartment buildings and a cluster of two-story duplex garden apartments, also subsidized. Compensation for property claimed by urban renewal enabled many of the merchants to move to new shops farther up the hill and along Main Street. More affluent blue-collar workers, many of them firstor second-generation European immigrants, could literally “move up” by building and buying duplexes and single-family homes in a small development farther up from the river, bordering more affluent middle-class housing developments. At the same time the demand for single-family homes by the growing numbers of middle-class professionals, many of them eligible for Veterans Administration loans because of their service in World War II, stimulated the carving up of the large estates on the ridge into large, mass-built housing subdivisions. A new Catholic church was sited on Main Street to serve nonethnic middle-class commuters. Residents in these areas, which I call the “outer village,” are primarily white, middle-class, white-collar workers who commute to work in New York City. By the late 1980s many of the wives commuted as well. Although the majority of families probably placed their children in institutional day care, in-home care by a nanny or an au pair was the preferred option (cf. Scandlyn 1993).12 Also, by the 1980s newly arrived Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin America had largely replaced the first- and second-generation European immigrants in the inner village in a pattern of “ethnic succession” (Agocs 1981). Unlike the previous generation of immigrants, few of these newcomers found work at the automobile assembly plant. Most found jobs in the service sector: in fast-food restaurants, construction, landscaping, and maintenance of suburban corporate office parks. Some of the older, long-time residents living in the inner village rented apartments to 182

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

the new immigrants. Others watched real-estate values rise dramatically, the product of an increased demand for housing by baby boomers entering the housing market. Instead of being happy with this development, they were disappointed that their children could not afford houses in the village commensurate with their expectations and so moved to suburbs farther outside the city. While the Italian Catholic church still had an active congregation in the 1990s, the Eastern European membership of the Slavic church had been replaced by Spanish-speaking immigrants. A priest from Latin America offered masses in Spanish. One of the Presbyterian churches on Main Street that dates to the early 1800s was purchased by a Korean Christian congregation. Thus Mayfield is a microcosm of the metropolitan area of which it is a part, with an inner village occupied by blue-collar workers and immigrants and an outer village occupied by professional, native-born commuters. Each social class has its distinct location. Mayfielders use the location of residents’ homes in the village to place them in the social hierarchy without challenging their belief that “everyone” in Mayfield is middle class. From these locations, in the conflict surrounding the school-budget crisis of 1988–1992, three factions emerged, distinguished by age and generation, ethnicity, and social class. The first faction comprised senior citizens, the majority of whom were natives of Mayfield, had worked locally at the automobile plant, worked in the building trades, or had owned bars, restaurants, or other small businesses. The second faction included young to middle-aged parents with children who were in or would soon attend the public schools. Most of these couples were not from Mayfield and had moved there from the city at or near the birth of their first child. In the majority of these families one or both adults commuted into the city to work in professional and managerial positions. The third group consisted of new immigrants from Latin America. When I did my fieldwork, the idea of immigrants moving directly to a suburb from countries throughout Central and South America still seemed novel. Even residents of Mayfield, many of whom were second-generation immigrants themselves, saw this as a “new” development in the town’s history. Latino immigrants were younger at entry than their white counterparts, and Latino families had 183

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

a higher proportion of children under the age of eighteen.13 Most of the town’s Latino parents worked long hours in service jobs such as landscaping, construction, and maintenance of office buildings and hotels. Levels of literacy in Spanish, fluency in English, and education varied greatly, but for the most part the newest arrivals were the least well educated. By blending personal preferences for housing with economic interests, Americans can actively seek conformity and homogeneity without threatening their values of equality, democracy, and access to economic and social opportunity. The strength of Mayfield’s invisible fences is witnessed by the fact that families could purchase homes there without seeing the community’s considerable socioeconomic and ethnic diversity. When the school-budget crisis broke through those fences, the very different vested interests dividing the community became all too visible.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

global forces in the suburbs: industrialization and immigration The first night we spent in our house in Mayfield my husband and I were jolted awake by the bang, screech, and clank of large pieces of metal hitting with considerable force. “What’s that?” I demanded of my husband as I checked the clock. It was 3:00 a.m. “Don’t know. Sounds like it’s coming from the river.” We ran to the window that looked out across the river to see a long line of freight cars moving very slowly back and forth on the commuter train line. When we discussed this breach of the usually quiet atmosphere of the town with our neighbor the next morning, he told us that at night the automobile plant ran freight trains so that the line would be free for commuter trains during the day. “It’s pretty noisy,” he said calmly. “But you’ll get used to it.” We did get used to it. After a few months the banging and clanging in the middle of the night only woke me if I was already half awake. But the freight traffic was a constant reminder that Mayfield was not an isolated haven for commuters but an active commercial center linked not only to the state’s capital to the east and New York City to the west but to global markets as well. 184

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

old immigrants, village “natives” For much of the local population, however, Mayfield was their home, the place where they were born, grew up, worked, and spent their leisure time. The construction of large rural estates with miles of stone fences, acres of gardens and managed forest, and roads and bridges, created the demand for skilled and unskilled craftsman in the building trades. Thus, from the mid to late nineteenth century, Mayfield attracted large numbers of “new” immigrants from Ireland and Italy. This story is typical of those I was told by senior citizens in Mayfield: My dad came as an immigrant of seventeen years of age from this little town in Sicily. . . . That was his first job, to dig some holes, to dig some trenches. And he just couldn’t believe when the man put money in his hand and it was this green paper. And he was absolutely thrilled. My father was a dry-wall maker. That’s what he was. Said he carried stones from when he was eight years old [in Sicily]. He looks at a stone now and he says, “I know whether it can go into a wall or not.” And he knows just how to crack it; you know, he’s really very astute as far as that’s con-

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

cerned.

When I asked senior citizens for names of people I might interview, they referred me to extended-family members: cousins, aunts, and uncles. Although some had moved to neighboring towns as they became more affluent or to get more space or land, most remained in Mayfield. I asked one woman why the two relatively small towns of Mayfield and East Mayfield had so many volunteer firehouses. She explained: “I don’t know what we’d do if they closed the firehouses. Where would the young men go? They go down there and play cards and hang out with the guys. It gets them out of the house but keeps them out of trouble. It’s probably saved a lot of marriages, too. They do an important job, too, don’t get me wrong. But there’s more to it than just fighting fires or going out on ambulance calls.” Firehouses and local government are important arenas of power and status for those who were born and grew up in Mayfield’s workingclass neighborhoods. 185

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

Though their daily lives revolve around Mayfield, the working-class seniors are nonetheless linked to global forces and markets. During World War II, National Auto converted its plant to manufacture airplanes for the military. Many of the African American seniors I interviewed had migrated to Mayfield from the South to take advantage of the wartime shortage of white workers and gain entry into the high-wage manufacturing sector. In the decades following the war, union jobs at National Auto provided workers with the means to move solidly into the middle class by income if not by education or occupation. A retired auto worker and longtime resident of Mayfield described the economic security he had gained working at National Auto: “In 1956 I started at National Auto. I started on the line like everybody. It was hard work, but the pay and benefits were triple what I had been earning at the nursery. After seven years on the line I moved to the maintenance department. The benefits were really good. I was able to retire at fifty-seven with a full pension.” Louise, a second-generation Italian American I interviewed, recognized her low status as a child of immigrants and decided to better herself by getting a college education and becoming a teacher in the local public schools. Her husband, despite her pressure on him to go to college and to her perpetual frustration, took out a loan and established an Italian restaurant that served mostly locals and employed his children and extended-family members. She contrasts the worldview of those who are locally based and those who “see beyond” Mayfield: “A lot of the people I grew up with think that things should be the way they were when they were growing up. It’s a really narrow-minded view. They don’t realize that the world is bigger and more complicated than when they were growing up. We can’t afford to be provincial any more. We have to prepare our children to be world citizens.” the “new” wave of latino immigrants Clearly Mayfield has never been isolated; it has always been affected by forces in the regional and global political economy of trade and migration. The latest influx of immigrants from Latin America is merely one more in a series of migrations to the area with different kinds of assimilation based 186

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

on historical, political, and economic factors in the region. According to local newspaper articles and the accounts of longtime residents, the first Spanish-speaking people to arrive in Mayfield were Cubans fleeing the Bay of Pigs incident in the 1960s. Generally well-educated, middle-class professionals, they easily blended into the local population of upwardly mobile first- and second-generation immigrants from Europe. In fact, it is more likely that, as in other New York suburbs, Puerto Ricans, who were able to get jobs at National Auto, were the first to break the housing barrier (Mahler 1995b). It was they who attracted middle-class Cubans, who saw in them a market for their professional skills (cf. Piore 1979; Waldinger, Aldrich, and Ward 1990). The only Latino to serve on Mayfield’s school board was a Cuban accountant. Unlike the Cubans, whose physical movement to Cuba was restricted by the anti-Castro embargo, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans actively maintained transnational ties by traveling between Mayfield and the islands and by visiting extendedfamily members in other parts of the metropolitan area. When I worked in the prenatal clinic in Mayfield, where three-quarters of the clients were Latino, I found that the prenatal care of Dominican clients was often interrupted by their month-long seasonal visits to the Dominican Republic. Though frustrating to healthcare professionals working in a system that mandates regular clinic visits, the birth outcomes of Dominican women suffered little from the interruptions. Maria Dominguez, who grew up in Puerto Rico and became my research assistant, had cousins, aunts, and uncles both in Puerto Rico and in the Bronx. Her small rented house in the inner village was always full of family members who were staying with her while they found a job or housing or until they returned to the island. The most recent group of immigrants to arrive in Mayfield is from Central and South America, part of a surge in migration that pushed Latinos to become the majority of residents in New York City.14 Between 1980 and 1990 the Latino population of Lincoln County almost doubled. In East Mayfield, where Latinos were already 22 percent of the town’s population in 1980, their number grew by half again, making up 34 percent of the town’s residents by 1990 (by 2000 the proportion of Latinos 187

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

was 45.1 percent). Mayfield thus had the highest concentration of Latinos in Lincoln County (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980, 1990, 2000). The majority of South Americans living in Mayfield at the time of my research were Ecuadorians with a smaller number from Peru. This most recent group of immigrants came to Mayfield for many of the same reasons as their predecessors. Housing mix is a primary determinant of the socioeconomic composition of a suburb’s population and remains fairly constant over time (Farley 1972; Duffy 1984). Once one or two families arrive in a town and secure work and housing, others from their extended family and social network arrive in a pattern of chain migration (Mahler 1995a). On many occasions at the clinic, Ecuadorian patients would smile at me slyly and say, “You know, señora, there are signs all over Ecuador saying, ‘Come to Mayfield. Free healthcare.’”

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

mixed reception Although there is considerable competition among the various national groups of Latino migrants, who see themselves as “Peruvians” or “Ecuadorians” (frequently preceded by an epithet), most non-Latino residents lump all Spanish-speaking residents into the group “Hispanic.” Even for non-Latinos, however, there is differential use of national and group labels to mark class differences. Spanish-speaking individuals who live in the inner village were labeled Hispanic, indicating that they were poor or working class, poorly educated, and displayed ethnic identity by speaking Spanish over English and wearing clothing, such as frilly dresses, that is perceived as “Hispanic.” In contrast Spanish-speaking individuals who lived in the more affluent neighborhoods were identified by their nationality, for example, “She’s Colombian,” or, “He’s Venezuelan,” to denote their middle-class background, ability and willingness to speak English, and higher education. Whereas middle-class Mayfielders view middle-class South Americans as “one of us,” they view Hispanics in the village more ambivalently. On the one hand, the presence of an immigrant community provides local color and a touch of cosmopolitanism to a small suburban town. But when their presence challenges middle- and upper-middle-class residents’ 188

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

.

jean n. scandlyn

perception of the town’s class character, the boundaries tighten. As one middle-class resident observed: “I really worry about the traffic on Maple Avenue in the summer. It’s all lowriders and old cars filled with Hispanics playing their radios at top volume and driving fifty miles an hour on their way to the park. The park is pretty, but I would never go there in the summer. It’s so crowded, you might as well be in the Bronx.” Workingclass seniors who live in the inner village often feel some identification with Hispanics based on their own immigrant heritage. But again, when immigrants threaten their hard-earned social status, they draw the line: “You’ve got to be in town [inner village] to see what’s going on. They started hanging laundry on the fence by the high-rise apartment building on Stuyvesant Street. They play their music so loudly you can hear it all over town. They litter and leave their garbage all over the streets. They drink in the streets and urinate in public.” This was not a conscious categorization; no one I interviewed observed the difference in how they used national and group labels. The awareness of social class as a basis for judgment was largely unacknowledged and attributed to ethnic or cultural differences.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

deindustrialization and the older suburb In the 1970s researchers called attention to the problems close-in suburbs faced as they aged and matured. Interstate highways facilitated the development of suburbs and shopping centers farther from the city and beyond the inner ring of older suburbs. Because they were often the site of industrial production, these older suburbs were also hit hard by the shift from manufacturing to services as New York became a global city (Newman 1988; Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Sassen 1991). Cities such as Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Stamford, Connecticut, once vibrant commercial centers, now have pockets of urban decay in their inner villages (Fishman 1987). As demand for housing grew, population density increased and eroded green space; as fewer nonurban workers lived near their place of work, towns hired paid professionals as mayors and town managers; and as real-estate values climbed, young families bought houses farther from 189

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

the city, leaving an aging population behind (Lisotkin and Beaton 1983; Muller 1981). Journalists label the latter phenomenon “aging in place.”15 In the 1990 census 13.7 percent of Mayfield’s residents were over sixtyfive, surpassing the national proportion of 12 percent but slightly lower than the county’s proportion of 14.4 percent. This is typical of suburban communities in the counties immediately surrounding New York City and older cities in the Northeast (Siegel and Taeuber 1986; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1990). In the first decades of National Auto’s history, the majority of workers at the plant lived in Mayfield so that they could walk to work and find housing to rent. After World War II rising affluence among blue-collar workers, especially those in unionized industries such as automobile manufacture; expanded roads and highways; and Veterans Administration home loans freed workers from living in Mayfield. By the 1990s the demand for housing within reasonable commuting distance of New York and the declining number of blue-collar jobs in the county drove young working-class families out of town. The median cost of a house in Mayfield in 1980 was $89,000; by 1990 it had tripled to $301,300 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980, 1990). By the late 1980s only 5 percent of Mayfield’s residents worked at National Auto. Matt Henderson, who grew up in Mayfield and worked for a corporation based in Manhattan, was active in town politics and described the effect of changing demographics on town life: People who grew up here can’t afford to stay here. We get a lot of people moving up from the city. They’re more concerned about the train schedule than getting involved in the community. They’re not volunteers. We’ve had a hard time finding volunteers for our fire department and ambulance squads. Either they live too far away or work too far away. Think about it. The kind of person who makes a good volunteer fireman either lives in the village or works in the village—so they can respond to calls day or night. If village employees can’t live here, how can we maintain a volunteer fire department?

As Mayfield’s single largest taxpayer, the plant continued to play a major role in town life and local politics. At the time of my fieldwork, 190

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

National Auto’s taxes accounted for 20 percent of municipal revenues and 8–10 percent of public-school revenues. In 1983 the company threatened to close its Mayfield plant and sued the town for overpayment of property taxes.16 Negotiations with the state, county, and town governments resulted in several concessions, including taking the plant off Mayfield’s tax rolls from 1985 to 1995 and substituting a schedule of annual payments in lieu of taxes (pilot). These payments are considerably less than what the corporation had been paying (the county supervisor estimated the total amount of tax abatements at $140 million). Also, in return for keeping the plant open, the state government agreed to raise all the railroad bridges between Mayfield and the state capital at the taxpayer’s expense.17 This only postponed the inevitable, and the plant closed in 1995. In addition to the fiscal pressure coming from National Auto, in 1990 the governor recommended massive cuts in state aid to education, and the legislature failed to pass its budget on deadline. This forced the school’s administrators and board to find additional ways to trim operating expenditures and yet provided no clear idea of what state revenues would be. Students from Mayfield High School ran a relay race to the state capital, a distance of 136 miles, carrying letters to the governor requesting that he consider Mayfield’s special needs. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict Despite the obvious stability of American institutions, Americans conceive of community as fragile, less an institution than a casual collection of individuals that may fall apart at the first signs of conflict. Despite the considerable economic investment that most Americans have in their houses that makes literal flight to another location impractical, informal social groups do dissolve in the face of differences of opinion when members must face the reality that not “everyone” thinks alike (Varenne 1977). The avoidance of direct conflict is most evident in the suburbs, argues M. P. Baumgartner, where conflict is managed whenever possible through avoidance, tolerance, and restraint (1988, 3). Much like the suburbanites Baumgartner interviewed, I viewed overt conflict as a threat to the fabric of the community. When I began fieldwork in 1988, I had been living in 191

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

Mayfield for only three years, most of which I had spent commuting to graduate classes in New York and raising my two young children when at home. I was surprised at the vehemence aroused in Mayfield by discussions of the school budget and astonished when, in 1989, the proposed budget was defeated by a considerable margin of 207 votes.18 In the ordinary course of events, the public-school board meeting is a ritual wherein citizens can state their positions while the emotions associated with those vested interests are contained. Herbert Gans, in The Levittowners (1967), proposes a model for understanding the mechanics of local government. The performance of the town council or schoolboard meeting deflects public opinion away from the decision makers while maintaining the appearance that decisions are indeed made democratically, when in fact they are made out of sight of the public eye, in executive sessions, committee meetings, or on the telephone. The meetings’ agendas effectively prevent free discussion between members of the board of education, the school district’s administrators, and the public. In Mayfield the periods for citizens’ comments bracket the discussion and vote on resolutions, preventing citizens from participating in the debate before action is taken. If the board thinks there is significant opposition to a resolution, it will table the vote to a future meeting rather than reword the resolution during the meeting. Even at public hearings that are ostensibly held to elicit public opinion on specific issues such as the budget, speaker’s comments are limited to five minutes. Citizens are permitted to ask only one question or address one topic, and they may direct their comments not to other members of the audience but only to members of the board of education. These features minimize direct confrontation between opposing factions. The issue that mobilized voters and ultimately “broke through” the performance of board meetings (Gans 1967) was the board of education’s proposal, attached to the annual budget in 1989, to build a new elementary school on a field the district already owned at the eastern edge of East Mayfield.19 A demographic study projected increasing enrollments as a growing number of young families with children moved to Mayfield, both middle-class commuters and Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants. 192

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

More classroom space was needed, and the school board appealed to voters by arguing that building one new elementary school would be less costly than expanding the three existing elementary schools in the district. The proposed new school did raise questions about who belonged in Mayfield and who had the “right” to determine the character of its chief public institution, the public schools. However, factions organized not around native-born versus foreign immigrant or white versus Latino as I had hypothesized, but around long-standing divisions of social class and age/generation. The issue was so hotly contested that citizens sat on opposite sides of the boardroom and shouted insults at one another and at board members with their fists raised, violating the prohibition against “cross talk,” not to mention norms of public civility. Attendance at board meetings, normally consisting of a dozen “regulars” and a few residents bringing special issues or problems to discuss, soared to several hundred throughout the spring. Meetings moved to the high school’s auditorium, where there were microphones for speakers, sessions could be recorded on videotape, and reporters from local and regional newspapers could cover the controversy. A local policeman was assigned to maintain order and prevent violence. Sessions that had previously ended by 10:00 p.m. routinely ran to 11:00 p.m. or 12:00 midnight as points were explained or debated. “old-timers” Senior citizens were the most vocal and organized bloc of voters. Their mission was to defeat the school budget and gain control over the board of education. Seniors’ position on the school budget was strongly determined by social class, education, and occupation: the most vocal, visible, and organized group were high school–educated, working-class seniors who opposed the budget and the school administration. College-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class seniors by and large supported the administration or argued for compromise. Three factors were important in shaping working-class seniors’ opposition to the school budget. Most significantly, the majority of seniors were retired and lived on fixed incomes. Although the increased value of their homes may have given 193

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

them significant wealth on paper, unlike more-affluent seniors, most had no intention of realizing their gains by selling their houses and moving to the Sun Belt or a retirement community.20 Thus their ability to pay their taxes and meet living expenses in the present outweighed their concern for maintaining property values in the future by having good public schools. Second, many seniors had achieved upward mobility with only a high school education. They felt that a basic education was good enough for children in the schools now and rejected arguments that a changing world demanded high schools that would prepare students for college. They charged middle-class parents with protecting their current classbased interests under the guise of these programs. As a senior who had lived all her life in Mayfield commented: “That parents’ organization is just an extension of the pta. Once their kids are out of school, they stop being active. But we’re still here, and the schools will still be here. What they push for are selfish measures. That’s what bothers me—they did not do it [fight for the budget] for the majority, but for their own kids.” Third, for many seniors I interviewed the expected life course is for their children to grow up, marry, and buy their own house in Mayfield to raise their children. They were disappointed that their grown children could not afford to buy houses in Mayfield. With no children they knew in the public schools, they resented spending their precious resources to educate other people’s children. Diane Green expressed her attitude toward the schools: “I usually don’t bother much about the school board because my kids are grown up and my grandchildren don’t live here. They don’t go to school here. I only pay attention when they start raising my taxes.” middle-class parents Middle-class parents, the other faction in the dispute, who had been in a business-as-usual mode until the budget’s defeat in 1989, rallied against the seniors. Although buying a house, for many their first home, in Mayfield might have been a stretch economically, the majority anticipated rising incomes over the next few years as they gained experience, seniority, and promotions. Their homes were not only their residence but the primary means through which they would increase their wealth. Thus 194

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

having public schools with a good reputation was essential to protecting and enhancing the resale value of their chief asset. The majority already had children in the public schools or would shortly. The quality of the schools, their facilities, and curricula bore a direct effect on their children’s chances for getting into good colleges and taking their place in the middle class. They believed that supporting public education even when one’s children were grown was part of the social contract between the generations. A middle-class parent with two children in the public schools said, “That’s a problem, because there is no sense of responsibility in educating the next generation.” Rachel Stevens, a mother with four children in the public schools, said: “I never thought I’d feel this way. I mean, I walk down Main Street and see old people and all I can think of is, ‘I’ll bet they voted against the budget.’ I get pretty angry. I know it’s hard for a lot of seniors to make it by [economically], and we should do all we can to help them out. I’m all for increasing the exemption from property taxes. It shouldn’t have to come down to choosing between senior citizens and children.”

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

latino immigrants as silent partners If choosing between senior citizens and children is unacceptable, then how did each faction justify their interests? Both factions used Latino immigrants as proxies. Because the state board of education mandated English as a second language (esl) and other programs directly targeting immigrants, these programs could not be cut from the budget. Consequently, middle-class parents rationalized the need for new facilities and smaller class sizes with the growing number of immigrant children and the multiple needs they brought to school with them. As Linda Kelly said: The poor kids in this district come to school with so many problems. . . . I worry that if my child is not a problem or isn’t real bright, he’ll just fade into the woodwork because the teacher will have all these other kids with so many problems to take care of. So far it’s ok because the class size is small, but if classes get bigger, it’ll just be custodial care, not education. 195

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

And the community isn’t supportive. If they have to cut the budget, they won’t cut esl, but they will cut art and music and the programs my kids

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

will benefit from.

Gifted and talented programs, small classrooms, esl and special-education classes, and academic “tracking” by ability would all buffer their children from poor Latino children in the district without stating this objective directly. Seniors, on the other hand, argued that it was the Latino children who were creating the need to raise school taxes. As one senior said at a school-board meeting, “These people come here and send their kids to our schools. They learn English, they learn to read and write, then they go back to South America or wherever they’re from and we don’t get the benefit of any of it. They’re just here for a free ride at our expense.” Although several of the seniors I interviewed, who were themselves the children or grandchildren of European immigrants, acknowledged the right of Latinos to immigrate to the United States and participate in its benefits, including public education, they felt that they should learn English by immersion as their ancestors had and that the basic education they had received was good enough for the newcomers.21 Eventually the process prevailed: compromises were negotiated, deals were made, and factions retreated into their separate neighborhoods. The proposal for a new school was abandoned, seven teaching positions and one administrative position were eliminated, budgets for conferences and continuing education for teachers and administrators were severely cut, and teaching assistants’ time in the classroom was reduced by one hour each day. The superintendent, who had been the target of much of the seniors’ invective, along with two principals, resigned. Perhaps most significantly for seniors, a process was instituted whereby they could gain exemptions from increases in property taxes based on their income. Although maximum class sizes in grades k–6 increased from twenty to twenty-five, most classes remained at precrisis levels, and art, music, gifted and talented, and computer-instruction programs and extracurricular clubs were funded once again. Parents created a not-for-profit foundation 196

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

that could raise money to support the programs they wanted without having to levy taxes. Most significantly for parents, in the school-board elections in 1991 parents regained the majority of seats on the board of education with a parent serving as chairperson. In reality local control over the public-school curriculum and budget was largely an illusion. The state board of education mandates most of the curriculum as well as standards for the provision of services for students with learning disabilities and other special needs including esl. The district must meet contractual obligations to teachers and administrators. Together these represent approximately 97 percent of the total budget. When the school budget was defeated in 1990 and the school board decided to adopt an austerity budget, the programs affected were interscholastic sports, student clubs, gifted and talented programs, and art, music, and computer instruction. Class size did not change nor did basic instruction or the number of staff. Despite the lack of voters’ effective control over the budget, the school-budget vote was an important vehicle for voters to express their frustration in the face of changing political and economic conditions. As one resident said, “You can’t do anything about President [G. W. H.] Bush’s budget; you can’t do anything about the governor’s budget; you can’t even do much about the town’s budget. But you can defeat the school budget. When voters get angry, they go to the polls and vote ‘No.’” As I completed my interviews and read more about Mayfield’s history, I realized that this was a long-standing cyclical pattern. Similar periods of conflict over the character of the public schools and their budget had occurred in the 1880s, just after World War II, and in the 1970s. These conflicts were not unique to Mayfield: newcomers—those who are new to the suburbs—and old-timers have been fighting over school budgets in American suburbs for generations throughout the United States (Salamon 2003; Wood 1958). Also not new was the incorporation of new immigrants as “silent partners” in the debates, stand-ins for the vested interests that were too politically risky for seniors or middle-class parents to argue for themselves directly. Too busy earning a living and insufficiently politically organized or fearful of being too visible because of their lack of 197

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

documentation, the new immigrants were essential, but passive, actors in the debate.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

reproducing class boundaries Although Mayfield’s budget crisis was precipitated by global processes of transnational migration and flexible capital, what resurfaced was longstanding disputes at the internal boundaries of social class expressed through the idiom of newcomer and old-timer that, in Mayfield, also encompassed age and generational differences. American citizens of European descent are not a homogeneous group but one with existing differences and conflicts that predate this newest influx of immigrants and that incorporates them into its categories to wage their ongoing battles. Thus older working-class residents, who view themselves in opposition to upper-middle-class residents, define themselves as “old-timers,” a discourse that has emerged in suburbs since the postwar building boom (Wood 1958; Salamon 2003). The presence of Latin American immigrants enables and pushes both older working-class residents and middle- and upper-middle-class parents to define themselves as “natives” in the school-budget debates. Thus the evocation of the past in terms of “first residence” is actually a product of recent events and transformations (Butler 1999). Public education is the focus of conflict because it is not only a domestic function that produces the next generation of workers and citizens but also an important symbol of what creates a community where “everybody” thinks the same way (Varenne 1977). A senior citizen who graduated from Mayfield High School just before World War II said, “And we had a terrific time. We used to have good fun during the football games and everything else.” As the statements of Mayfield’s seniors and parents reveal, however, not everyone does think alike about public education. Mayfielders implicitly recognize that economic interests are embedded in attitudes toward public education when they link real-estate values to the reputation of a community’s public schools or when they make assumptions about residents’ stand on school-budget issues based on whether they are “seniors” or “those commuters.” Because education in 198

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

the United States is supposed to be classless (Gans 1967), class boundaries are enforced through indirect means, by cloaking vested interests in the interests of others who do not or cannot speak for themselves. In a study of residents of the exclusively upper-class and mixed-class suburbs of New Bedford and Mount Kisco, New York, Duncan and Duncan (1997) argue that the “ideology of possessive individualism” provides the basis for residents’ understanding of their landscape. The ideology rests on three components: private ownership, democracy among equal individuals, and local control. This ideology not only supports structures of inequality; it keeps residents from seeing how inequality is institutionalized, often against their wishes. In the case of public schools, the ideology of local control keeps school districts small and limited in their power to control the very real and powerful forces that impinge on their communities. In Mayfield this gave taxpayers little flexibility and few resources with which to respond to National Auto’s tax certioraris and meant that less-affluent East Mayfield limited how “middle-class” the schools could become. Whereas individual residents of Mayfield may have been relatively equal in their capacity as voters, they were definitely not equal in their ability to “vote with their feet” (by moving to another town or sending their children to private schools) or to raise private funds for the schools, or to negotiate with National Auto or the state government. Mayfielders varied in their explanations of the sources for the schoolbudget crisis. As in Duncan and Duncan’s study, their responses correlated with age, education, and occupation. Working-class seniors with high school educations saw the source in the elite parents of the town but did not see how they, too, were constrained by institutions such as propertytax structures. The majority of middle-class parents saw the conflict as one between two groups with different vested interests but with an equal voice in influencing local government (in fact they felt that seniors had a more powerful say in Mayfield). Only one senior, an engineer who was a native of the town, explained the budget crisis as resulting from structural factors: “You have to understand the tax system in Lincoln County, which is no easy thing. We in East Mayfield have really gotten the rotten part of the deal in the consolidation with Mayfield. We are a much 199

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

smaller district with a lot of nonresidential land. So our population hasn’t expanded like Mayfield’s. So we’ve always borne more of the tax burden, and it’s gotten much worse since National Auto won the tax certiorari.” A middle-class parent, in an editorial in the New York Times, reminded Mayfielders of the role that National Auto was playing in the crisis: “Most residents simply can’t afford to provide the schools with the increased financial support that successful, all-American corporations refuse to offer. So let Japan, Inc. buy up corporate America, starting with National Auto. We prefer the Japanese sense of community spirit to the American profit-or-perish philosophy.”22 With residents unable or unwilling to recognize the institutionalized class boundaries within and around their town, they are unable to respond actively to forces from outside it. The result is a misguided response in which immigrants are scapegoated and residents remain internally divided rather than mobilizing themselves around common interests.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

on borders and fieldwork But do Mayfielders really want a more unified sense of community, one that comes not from a corporation but from recognizing their place in the larger political economy and taking action from that location? As long as public schools are funded primarily through property taxes, they will be inherently unequal and inconsistent in quality. Housing mix is patterned and relatively stable, so wealthier communities are able to maintain their large acreage and residential character because surrounding communities house workers (Duncan and Duncan 1997). Until residents of the more “mixed” town realize that they are, in effect, subsidizing their wealthier neighbors, these cycles of crisis will reoccur. To achieve this would require challenging the ideology of local control of public education. As I have shown, voters in Mayfield have very little real control over programs or expenditures. Rather than view this as a violation of their right to determine the character of their neighborhood school, they might embrace it as a means to argue for regional or state-level funding for public schools that would ensure that no school is underfunded or has to scramble to meet its basic operating budget. Residents would still be 200

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

jean n. scandlyn

free to tax themselves or voluntarily contribute to funding programs, facilities, or staff members that serve their particular interests. Working for regional or state funding would, I imagine, feel truly revolutionary to most suburbanites. Thus this study addresses two points raised by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson in their essay on fieldwork in contemporary anthropology. First, Mayfield reveals that home, too, can be a place of difference, a suitable field for anthropological inquiry (1997, 12–13) and that distance from one’s field site can have many meanings (Passaro 1997). It is taking seriously the idea that “we” have culture, too, and that the “core” is also a hybrid space. Thus the differences at home might not be what we expect them to be. In Mayfield the real “newcomers” were the middle-class parents who moved out from the city and challenged the local political power of the senior citizens, whose lives were firmly rooted in the town and its institutions. Although ethnic and racial conflict existed and could be fairly dramatic at times, class conflict was ultimately more instrumental in maintaining the town’s character.23 However, because social class remains invisible and coded by ethnicity and race, the public dialogue functions primarily to release long-standing tension rather than to resolve or address it. Thus the school-board debates and elections resemble the “mechanism to cloak fundamental disharmonies” that occur in small communities described by anthropologists in Wales (Frankenberg 1957) and Africa (Gluckman 1965). Here the community study is a particularly effective method. If I had remained adamantly committed to studying the delivery of healthcare, I would have dismissed the school-budget crisis as important but boring background information and not recognized its function as a lightning rod for class-based conflict. Because it combines economic interests at so many levels: property ownership and wealth, income and its redistribution through taxes, and the transmission of cultural knowledge and capital across generations, public education in the United States will always be an important arena for understanding the character of communities. By looking closely at the school-budget crisis, many other aspects of Mayfield’s life, including the delivery of healthcare, were explained as well. 201

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

local conflict, global forces

Second, the community study illustrates the importance of studying “shifting locations” and “forging links between different knowledges” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 38–39). Examining these issues in a small community highlights the need to trace local problems to the regional, national, and global forces, both economic and political, that affect their emergence. In a world where national borders are increasingly porous, it becomes critical to examine the borders within our communities, those invisible fences with which we police and maintain local distinctions between old-timer and newcomer, family and outsider, native and immigrant. These are the mechanisms that will determine on a local level what transnationalism looks like. “Natives” are not going to actively and meaningfully incorporate new immigrants into their communities as long as ethnic identity trumps social-class distinctions and interests in public dialogue.24 As a middle-class parent noted, “The only thing that makes economic sense in Lincoln County is to consolidate the school districts into a county system or two or three large districts. That way you reduce the administrative bureaucracy and save money. But nobody wants to join up with Mayfield because of our large Hispanic population.” Public policy and social action that fail to take local perspectives and local vested interests into account will not succeed in improving the lives of immigrants. But it is not sufficient to study shifting locations; we must study them in new ways. What this analysis indicates is that anthropologists who plan to study suburbia need to extend and refocus current approaches to reveal the complex ways in which those who receive immigrants into their communities exercise agency. I use the word “receive” here because reception is an active process. Longtime residents may not choose who arrives in their community, from where, or when, but they do exercise choice in how those new arrivals are integrated into the local social structure. Whereas we are accustomed to thinking of members of immigrant groups, defined by ethnicity and race, using their social identity strategically to negotiate class boundaries, we do not always consider that native groups may also use their, that is, the immigrants’ ethnicity and race to negotiate their own, that is, native-born, class boundaries at local, regional, and global levels. The children of previous groups of immigrants are now left to defend and 202

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

maintain the boundaries that their parents and grandparents crossed. Like Pratt we must take power into account but never assume that we know exactly where power lies or how it is being exercised. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, in this case working as a native within my own culture in a community in which I had vested interests as a parent and homeowner, yielded a very rich field experience. Schoolboard meetings were boring and tedious until I became an insider with stakes in the game. By crossing borders between native and anthropologist, I was able to understand the importance of emotion in illuminating a significant but subtle area of community life. Thus, like Anne Fadiman (1997), I am convinced more than ever that the most interesting action occurs were “the edges meet.” notes 1. Mayfield and Lincoln County are pseudonyms. The names of all geographic locations, institutions, and people in the town have been changed to protect informants’ anonymity. 2. I intentionally use “natural” here in the unexamined, essentialist way that it is used by the majority of native-born U.S. residents. For a more complete discussion of the concepts of “blood,” “nature,” and “love” and how they Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

shape American (i.e., U.S.) categories of relatives, family, and neighbors, see Perin 1988 and Schneider 1968. 3. A search of the Anthropological Index Online (accessed August 1, 2004) and Anthropological Literature (cd-rom 2004) on the key word “suburb” yielded twenty-two references under the term “suburb.” Of these the majority were clearly by anthropologists studying U.S. communities. Anthropologists who have looked at suburban communities from the point of view of nonimmigrants or as important cultural “sites” in and of themselves include Susan Greenbaum, Carol Greenhouse, Setha Low, Sarah Mahler, Katherine Newman, and Constance Perin. Some interesting studies have looked at suburbs in Australia, New Zealand, and England (Silverstone 1997). Sociologists have been much more active in studying suburbs as they are more likely than anthropologists to spend most of their careers studying in the society in which they were raised (Collier 1997). 203

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

4. Although Herbert Gans’s study The Levittowners was written in the late 1960s largely in response to the then-current depictions by scholars and social critics of the suburbs as “cultural wastelands,” the antisuburban bias among intellectuals has proved remarkably resilient. 5. Reporters in the New York area are gradually incorporating the region’s immigrant history into their reports of larger, closer-in suburbs such as Yonkers and Port Chester, New York (see Elsa Brenner’s article on Port Chester, October 24, 2004, and the article “Community of Diversity, Now, of Tragedy,” March 15, 2003, both in the New York Times), but for the more outlying communities, that history remains largely unexamined in media accounts (see Marilyn Shapiro’s article of December 24, 2000; Penny Singer’s article of March 12, 2000; and Marek Fuchs’s article of April 12, 2002, all in the New York Times). 6. This chapter is based on research undertaken for my doctoral dissertation (Scandlyn 1993). 7. As more anthropologists work in the United States as their primary area of study, this is slowly changing. Structuring Diversity, edited by Louise Lamphere (1992), includes several studies of the interaction between established residents and immigrants in U.S. communities. Sonya Salamon (2003) looked at responses of “old-timers” to internal migrants in new subCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

urbs built in rural small towns in the Midwest. 8. The research took place over four years, from January 1989 to December 1992. I attended biweekly meetings of the board of education from 1989 to the spring of 1991 (three election cycles), pta meetings and candidates’ nights, budget workshops and hearings, and selected meetings of the town’s board of trustees. I also spent time at the local senior center and attended local fairs and activities. I supplemented this data by reading letters to the editor and stories printed in the local and regional newspapers, written reports and information supplied by the school district to the public, and school-district statistics available under the federal Freedom of Information Act. Between 1990 and 1991 I interviewed seventy individuals representing over fifty-five households. Although most informants were recruited through a snowball sample, I tried as much as possible to select informants purposively to represent the different neighborhoods of both 204

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

towns to create a sample roughly matching the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the town. Although I interviewed many Latinos informally, I was assisted in the formal interviews by a native Spanishspeaking resident who also served as a key informant. The project was approved by the Human Subjects Research Committee of Columbia University. All informants signed a written consent form (in English and Spanish) explaining the nature of the research, risks, and how confidentiality would be maintained. 9. Duncan and Duncan (1997) provide an excellent discussion of how history becomes linked with aesthetic values in elite American suburbs in Westchester County, New York. 10. The 2000 census showed a population of 20,302. Individuals of Hispanic or Latino descent comprised 16.2 percent of Mayfield’s population; 45.1 percent of East Mayfield’s (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000). 11. This group was part of the Wappinger Confederacy of the Mohegan family (Canning and Buxton 1975, 16–18). 12. I do not have reliable statistics on the number or percentage of children of working mothers enrolled in various forms of institutionalized day care for the time of my fieldwork. Options included professional day-care centers, day-care centers in homes (licensed and unlicensed), preschools, and Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

extended-care programs offered through the public schools, local churches, and several nonprofit organizations such as the ymca. 13. See “Age of Immigrants,” New York Times, April 10, 1992, b1; Bean and Tienda 1987. 14. See Edward B. Fiske, “Now Whites Are Minority in New York,” New York Times, March 22, 1991, b1, b2; Foner 1987. 15. “Graying of a Co-op: Looking Within for Help,” New York Times, May 19, 1991, 28. 16. These legal challenges to property tax assessments are known as tax certioraris. They can be filed by any property owner, individual or corporate. According to the town’s financial manager, in 1991 there had been no cases in this state where a corporation had not won its suit. In many settlements school districts and municipalities not only must accept lower tax revenues from these corporations; the court also orders the school district to com205

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

pensate them for past overpayment of taxes, as was the case in Mayfield with National Auto. These suits are part of a national “tax revolt” that began in the 1950s in California. For a full discussion of the effect of tax revolts on school spending, see my dissertation (Scandlyn 1993). 17. The bridges were raised to accommodate the shipment by rail of minivans that were taller than sedans. 18. The tally was 668 votes against, 461 votes for. Thus the margin of defeated was 18 percent of the total votes cast. 19. A “break” occurs in a ritual performance when the expected sequence of action is interrupted by an overflow of emotion. In the case of citizen marches or protests, for example, interaction between police and protesters that goes beyond an impersonal exchange might “break through” the containment of the ritual and generate a riot or the joining together of forces. Images of these moments become icons for future rituals, for example the ’60s hippie who places a daisy in the muzzle of a gun or the Chinese protester who stands in the path of a tank in Tiananmen Square. 20. Despite stereotypes of senior citizens moving en masse from northern suburbs to developments in the Sun Belt, in reality less than 5 percent of people over the age of sixty-five move; the majority of those who do change their residence to another suburban location (Fitzpatrick and Logan 1985; Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Siegel and Taeuber 1986). 21. Latino immigrants and parents were not passive with regard to public education; they were just not active in the sphere of school-board and schoolbudget debates and elections. A discussion of their interests and attitudes is beyond the scope of this essay. For a full discussion, see my dissertation (Scandlyn 1993) and Sarah Mahler’s ethnography of Salvadorans in a suburb on Long Island, American Dreaming (1995a). 22. Margaret Lansing, editorial in the New York Times, March 17, 1990, 27. 23. In 1986 there was an outbreak of violence between African American and Latino residents of the inner village in East Mayfield. There is decided animosity between African Americans and Latinos, the former perceiving that Latinos are “taking over” the inner village and its services. For a more complete discussion of interethnic relations in Mayfield, see Scandlyn 1993. 24. I thank my colleague Sarah Hautzinger for this insight and its phrasing. 206

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

references Agocs, Carol. 1981. Ethnic settlement in a metropolitan area: A typology of communities. Ethnicity 8:127–48. Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. Richard G. Fox, 191–210. Santa Fe nm: School of American Research Press. Baumgartner, M. P. 1988. The moral order of a suburb. New York: Oxford University Press. Bean, Frank D., and Marta Tienda. 1987. The Hispanic population of the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Bluestone, Barry, and Bennett Harrison. 1982. The deindustrialization of America: Plant closings, community abandonment, and the dismantling of basic industry. New York: Basic Books. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Canning, Jeff, and Wally Buxton. 1975. History of Mayfield. Harrison ny: Harbor Hill Books. Collier, Jane F. 1997. The waxing and waning of “subfields” in North American sociocultural anthropology. In Anthropological locations: Boundaries and

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

grounds of a field science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 1–46. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duffy, Michael Joseph. 1984. Neighborhood change in older suburbs: A case study of suburban neighborhoods in southern Westchester County. PhD diss., Fordham University. Duncan, Nancy G., and James S. Duncan. 1997. Deep suburban irony: The perils of democracy in Westchester County, New York. In Visions of suburbia, ed. Roger Silverstone, 161–79. London: Routledge. Fadiman, Anne. 1997. The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Farley, Reynolds. 1972. Suburban persistence. In North American suburbs: Politics, diversity, and change, ed. John Kramer, 82–96. Berkeley ca: Glendessary. 207

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

Fishman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois utopias: The rise and fall of suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Fitzpatrick, Kevin M., and John R. Logan. 1985. The aging of the suburbs, 1960–1980. American Sociological Review 50 (February 22): b16. Foner, Nancy. 1987. Introduction: New immigrants and changing patterns in New York City. In New immigrants in New York, ed. Nancy Foner, 1–34. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. From Ellis Island to jfk: New York’s two great waves of immigration. New Haven ct: Yale University Press. Frankenberg, R. J. 1957. Village on the border. London: Cohen and West. Gans, Herbert J. 1967. The Levittowners: Ways of life and politics in a new suburban community. New York: Columbia University Press. Gluckman, Max. 1965. Politics, law and ritual in tribal society. Chicago: Aldine. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. Discipline and practice: “The field” as site, method, and location in anthropology. In Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 1–46. Berkeley: University of California Press. Higham, John. 1972. Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism 1860–1925. 2nd ed. New York: Atheneum. Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

States. New York: Oxford University Press. Lamphere, Louise. 1992. Introduction: The shaping of diversity. In Structuring diversity: Ethnographic perspectives on the new immigration, ed. Louise Lamphere, 1–34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lisotkin, David, and W. Patrick Beaton. 1983. Revitalizing the older suburb. New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University, Center for Urban Policy Research. Mahler, Sarah J. 1995a. American dreaming: Immigrant life on the margins. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995b. Salvadorans in suburbia: Symbiosis and conflict. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Marcus, George E. 1986. Contemporary problems of ethnography in the modern world system. In Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus, 165–93. Berkeley: University of California Press. 208

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

jean n. scandlyn

Muller, Peter O. 1981. Contemporary suburban America. Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall. Musbach, James R. 2002. The changing demographic geography of the U.S.: 1990 to 2000. Presentation at the Citipostum on America’s Future Urban Landscape. Kansas City mo, April 26. Nader, Laura. 1974. Up the anthropologist: Perspectives gained from studying up. In Reinventing anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Random House. Newman, Katherine. 1988. Falling from grace: The experience of downward mobility in the American middle class. New York: Free Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 2003. New Jersey dreaming: Capital, culture, and the class of ’58. Durham mc: Duke University Press. Passaro, Joanne. 1997. “You can’t take the subway to the field!”: “Village” epistemologies in the global village. In Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 147–62. Berkeley: University of California Press. Perin, Constance. 1988. Belonging in America: Reading between the lines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Piore, Michael J. 1979. Birds of passage: Migrant labor and industrial societies.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1999. Arts of the contact zone. In Ways of reading, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky. 5th ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~stripp/2504/pratt.html (accessed January 2, 2009). Salamon, Sonya. 2003. Newcomers to old towns: Suburbanization of the heartland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Scandlyn, Jean N. 1993. When the social contract fails: Intergenerational and interethnic conflict in an American suburban school district. PhD diss., Columbia University. Schneider, David M. 1968. American kinship: A cultural account. Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice Hall. 209

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

local conflict, global forces

Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. 1972. The hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books. Siegel, Jacob S., and Cynthia M. Taeuber. 1986. Demographic dimensions of an aging population. In Our aging society: Paradox and promise, ed. Alan Pifer and Lydia Bronte, 79–110. New York: W. W. Norton. Silverstone, Roger, ed. 1997. Visions of suburbia. London: Routledge. Stilgoe, John R. 1988. Borderland: Origins of the American suburb, 1820–1939. New Haven ct: Yale University Press. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1980. 1980 census of the population. Washington dc: U.S. Government Printing Office. ———. 1990. 1990 census of the population, general population characteristics. Washington dc: U.S. Government Printing Office. ———. 2000. 2000 census of the population. http://factfinder.census.gov/ home/saff/main.html?_lang=en (accessed January 2, 2009). Varenne, Hervé. 1977. Americans together: Structured diversity in a midwestern town. New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Waldinger, Roger D., Howard Aldrich, Robin Ward, and Associates. 1990. Ethnic entrepreneurs: Immigrants business in industrial societies. Sage Series on Race and Ethnic Relations 1. Newbury Park ca: Sage. Wood, Robert C. 1958. Suburbia: Its people and their politics. Boston: Houghton Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Mifflin.

210

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

7. El Envío Remittances, Rights, and Associations among Central American Immigrants in Greater Washington dc

barbara burton and sarah gammage

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

comité tejar In spite of the sudden and tragic loss of her twenty-one-year-old son to a gang-style street shooting not far from her home in Washington dc, Elvia was determined to go on with the fundraising event she and her small group, the Comité Tejar, had been planning for many weeks. The church had been willing to let them use the gymnasium, the chickens had been ordered, and the Charismatic Catholic Concert must go on. At the door she and her colleagues greeted parishioners and community members with stoic smiles, stamped their hands, and encouraged the purchase of new T-shirts ordered for the occasion. Elvia was quick to point to the small tagboard poster of snapshots she had arranged to display the work of the organization—showing throngs of rural Salvadoran children receiving new notebooks and other school supplies with delight on their faces— with a caption that said: “This is the reason for our work—the children.” Amid the 150 or so who made it to the church gymnasium that rainy Saturday evening were several children, who ran in and out of chairs and up and down the stairs. Finely primped teenagers sat in the bleachers trying desperately to look bored, and there were chairs on the gymnasium floor for the older people, who clapped and danced and responded passionately to the Latin-style Christian evangelical music and to some of the performers. When one of the bandleaders asked the crowd how many were Salvadorans, almost every hand went up enthusiastically. The music

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

el envío

continued to pound and echo through the neon-lit gymnasium until after midnight, while men clustered in varying groups in corners and near the sound system, and others stood eating roast chicken on rice from their paper plates. In the end the Comité barely broke even with the event but took comfort in the knowledge that now people knew of their work. They would do better next time.1

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

sending, moving, and anthropology So goes one story of one small grassroots “hometown association,” or hta, that organizes U.S.-based migrants from the rural Southwest of El Salvador to contribute their hard-earned money to community works back home. Our study examined these organizations and their histories, members, practices, and discourses as they operate within a larger transnational process of sending and receiving between the “home,” or origin, communities of El Salvador and the large and extremely vital Latino migrant community in greater Washington dc. We were interested in the sending—what gets sent back and forth between “hometowns”—how it gets sent, and what we might learn from these flows. The flows tell a range of stories about migration, about transnational identity, about the role of the state in contemporary development and in a now transmigratory process—a coming and going—that appears to be slowly reconfiguring borders and boundaries of many sorts. Surely migration has always been about the moving of people, the making of places, as well as the transfer of ideas and habits. It appears also that intellectual strategies seeking to recharacterize migration and globalization and reframe areal studies emerge from the same political and cultural flow. Such movement may unwittingly carry scholars and advocates far from where they began, faster than they anticipated into and across new fields, methodologies, and conversations. Thus anthropologists trained to identify living cultural entities and discourses are stretched and pulled to expand paradigms and reconsider practices in order to grasp the mobile textures and shifting identities emerging in today’s transregional “areas.” Methodologically we find that participant observation in migration includes participating in the sometimes silent or disillusioned formation 212

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

barbara burton and sarah gammage

of possibilities, as well as the vocalized and clarifying decisions to move. And participating in transmigration involves being privy to the sometimes rapid travel of multilayered and highly charged ideals: about globalization being liberatory or oppressive; of the migrant as dependent, abused, or autonomous; of the transmigratory process as signaling the beginning of the end of the nation-state, or the global neoliberal transformation; and of diasporas as the “breeding ground” or funding bank for political movements back home. But tracking these flows is also about traversing toward what cannot yet be known, what can only be imagined apart from or beyond a place. In unheard and unseen spaces, individuals and families envision, negotiate, and nurture a dream about what is elsewhere and then learn to live it, respond to it, and create it. The story of transmigration is thus also about this process and about the realities of living with the despair and ensuing hopelessness of these dreams not coming true. In their work on transnational migration, Sarah Mahler and Patricia Pessar (2001) describe the importance of attending to what they call a “transnational cognitive space” in making better sense of the role of individual agency, the imaginary and the unarticulated thoughts that shape and underlie the realities of the “transnational social field.” Thus we might examine this cognitive space to understand the intense complexity of dreamed possibility, disillusionment, and hybrid identities that comprise the phenomena of transmigration. Understanding how this dreaming works is an important key to understanding the nature of transnational locality. Recent immigrant policy struggles continue to show, however, that exploring the dreams produced by globalizing economic trends and transnational spaces does not imply that they are to be celebrated. Instead, our work conceives of the transmigrant social experience as a dialectical process in which “new relations of domination and exploitation may emerge from old hegemonic strategies” (Landolt 1997, 3). In a necessarily interdisciplinary dance between economic models and ethnographic interpretation, we are interested in both: the emancipatory potential of transnationalism and the “old hegemonic strategies” that underpin individual and group struggles to establish places, maintain pasts, and survive. 213

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

el envío

A study of crossing borders requires the crossing of disciplinary borders as well. Clearly, it has never been adequate to only trace the economic tectonics of transglobal movement, for the narrative heart of each migrant’s story contains links between dollars, dreams, and practical struggles that are nearly always messy. So our transmigratory research sought to further document “the nature of locality as lived experience,” in Arjun Appadurai’s (1992, 191) terms, or, in the words of Nina Glick Schiller and her colleagues, to better recognize transnational processes within the “warp and woof of daily activities, concerns, fears, and achievements” (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc 1995, 5). We began by asking, how are people affected by the everyday timespace compression of transnational spaces and translocal environments even when they do not migrate anywhere? How do transnational processes actually shape identities and build cross-border systems of solidarity? And more practically, what does it mean when a struggling migrant family moves here and then sends hard-earned dollars back to their original home? Working with these questions represents an effort to contribute further not just to a better understanding of migration or adaptation per se but to a broadened view of transnational localism: an experience that captures the feel and life of rehoned identities and the everyday imaginative work of transmuting homes, relationships, entitlements, fantasies, and political ideologies. cash flows and community ties: salvadorans in dc Our study was framed with these questions and consisted of travels through and with the mix of locals and locales in Greater dc, a region that has become one of the foremost immigrant destinations in the United States (cla 2002; Manning 1996; Singer et al. 2003, 2005).2 During the last three decades, the population of foreign-born residents in the region has increased dramatically from one in twenty-two to one in six residents (Singer et al. 2001, 2003; Cary 1996). Salvadorans dominate the flow of migrants to the Greater Washington area, making up approximately 14 percent of the foreign born. In fact, Washington dc is fast becoming the number one destination for Salvadoran migrants, particularly those from 214

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

barbara burton and sarah gammage

eastern El Salvador and departments such as La Unión and San Miguel (cla 2002; U.S. Bureau of Census 2002; Singer et al. 2003). The combination of a stagnating agricultural sector, civil war, and the more recent impact of environmental disasters such as Hurricane Mitch has increased the economic isolation and marginalization of many and spurred rising emigration (iom 1999; Boyce and Pastor 1997; Migration Policy Institute 2006). For a substantial number of Salvadorans and other Central Americans, the chance to live abroad has been critical to their economic survival and well-being. Once the immigrants are in the United States, the difficulties of adjusting to a new life in Washington dc are compounded by the spatially dispersed locations of other immigrants in the region. As formal responses from the state and other institutions to the needs of this vast and heterogeneous population of immigrants are still in their infancy, newcomers in many locations have come to rely ever more heavily on informal networks within their own communities (see, for example, Levitt 2001; Burton 2004; Gammage 2004; Menjívar 2000; Goldring 1996; Mahler 1995; Repak 1995; Massey 1985; Newbold 1999). These networks are constantly being negotiated, reinforced, and challenged as residents strive to broaden and deepen ties to other Salvadorans, to learn about home, about opportunities, and about their rights. They also build channels for participation in Salvador’s development (Rivera-Salgado 2000; Stoltz Chinchilla and Hamilton 1998). Indeed, in spite of painful financial needs and exhausting schedules, Salvadorans in the United States choose to meet, to organize, and to send hard-earned money home not only to family but to community projects, social programs, and other development efforts in El Salvador. The development activities of these associations are significant (see for example, Alarcon 2000; Andrade Eekhoff 2001, 2003; idb 2001; Lowell and De la Garza 2000; Orozco 2000). For example, the Arlington, Virginia, association of Las Chinamecas has contributed over eighty thousand dollars toward a school building, a septic tank, a small clinic, and an ambulance (Lowell and De la Garza 2000). The Committee to Improve the City of El Chiquirín raised more than twenty thousand dollars to pave 215

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

el envío

the town’s main road, and the Salvadoran United Committee for Intipucá donates in excess of ten thousand dollars a year for development projects such as purchasing an ambulance, paving streets, improving drainage, and building a small stadium.3 In our research we sought to see these projects in action—both the groups that raise the money and the groups that receive the goods—and we wanted to hear migrants’ stories about the sending as well as the leaving and returning. So we became multisite, transmigratory researchers along with our subjects—traveling between migrant sending communities and greater dc, between the families and projects supported by remittance practices and those who send the support. We studied Salvadoran htas in the Washington dc area by interviewing group members, participating in meetings, collecting data on migration and remittance practices from 120 Salvadoran residents in the metropolitan dc area, and visiting the hometown communities in El Salvador.4

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the life of and for remittances The study of remittances, while not new, has taken on a new life in recent years due to the tremendous amount of money being sent and the impact or potential impact of these funds on development. Salvadoran ambassador Rene León estimates that 10 percent of the assistance to his country comes from Salvadoran expatriate groups donating to community projects back home, and the total amount sent home to family or community by Salvadoran immigrants was approximately two billion dollars in 2001.5 Development economists have long considered money sent back by individuals—so-called family remittances—but now there is more interest in making sense of these collective remittances, what they do and why and how they happen. Economists, Latin American diplomats, government representatives, and development advocates now hold high-level discussions to explore the so-called productive use of remittances, to find ways to manage and shape these investments (cepal 1998; idb 2001; Inter-American Dialogue 2002; fusades 1996a, 1996b). Critical development debates continue about how remittance funds are being exploited and whose 216

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

barbara burton and sarah gammage

responsibilities are being shirked. Such discussions make more evident that these are explicitly multilayered flows, combining dollars with an intricately woven social and political web (fisdl 2000; Desipio 2000). Indeed, we found Peggy Levitt’s use of the term “social remittances”—the diffusion of social practices, ideas, and identities that flow to and from host- and sending-country communities (Levitt 2001)—to be central in understanding how individual and collective sending works to both maintain and support ties and structures, and transform and reconfigure identities, beliefs, and communities. Although both forms of remitting derive from similar interests in affirming ties and claiming membership, there are interesting and important differences in the practice of sending to family and that of sending collectively. And we have explored the ways in which sending strategies operate within families whose livelihoods and members straddle painful distances.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

engendering, exploiting, and remitting the costs of family Scores of Salvadoran women have had the heart-wrenching experience of having to leave young children at home with female kin when they migrate to the United States to take care of American homes and children. Their painful and costly journeys then reduce the costs for some American women to pursue employment outside the home, for some American men to continue to avoid domestic labor, and for the American government to continue to shirk responsibility for childcare. Sending and receiving money and goods becomes literally a life-giving flow of hope, regret, loss, and inspiration for those women who live with their employers and their children who live with relatives at home.6 Family obligations have other costs as well. Armand, a forty-something native of San Salvador, recounts painfully how hard he worked to save money for college after arriving in dc as a young man. “I would not have my brother support me; that is what drove me to work.” Working multiple jobs throughout his twenties amounted to nothing in the end when his mother then became sick and he was expected to support her. He dutifully drained all his savings until she died, and he passed up the 217

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

el envío

opportunity to attend college. He still speaks haltingly about his yearning for more education, his memory of knowing that “the sweet days were gone” when he came to the United States to escape the war and in so doing gave up what had appeared to be a middle-class future in El Salvador and began a series of landscaping and car- and dish-washing jobs in the United States to support his family. A key feature of the remittance practices evident here is the tightly woven bundle of norms, obligations, and affective ties that underlie and shape the pattern of sending. The particular family relationships, the gender and generation of the sender or recipient, and the particular claims made on either end are integral. That migration is often a household and community strategy for survival infuses the experience of the migrant with a deep-seated sense of responsibilities. As remittance scholar Luin Goldring writes, “Sending or not sending money may be shaped by labor market opportunities and personal income management strategies, but failure to send money to one’s relatives will probably be interpreted as a form of social as well as economic failure” (2002, 10). Households that are separated by time and distance struggle to remain attached through telephone calls, gifts, and letters and by making joint decisions about the use of remittances. Remittance couriers and wire services such as BanComercio, Gigante Express, and Western Union facilitate these exchanges throughout the Greater dc area, and long lines that form outside these services are common Friday-afternoon sights in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington dc.

viajeros and viajeras We have learned, however, that many Salvadorans prefer a more informal practice of sending that artfully integrates the social and the economic dimensions of the remittance: via viajeros and viajeras. These are the private couriers who live between the United States and El Salvador on tourist visas or who have managed to regularize their status, who live aquí and allá (here and there). They may live in Salvador for fifteen days and return to the United States for fifteen. They come and go, accumulating air miles with international airlines and earning privileges that allow them to 218

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

barbara burton and sarah gammage

take more bags, to pay less in cargo fees, and to live by bringing and taking goods. Although no official register exists for the numbers of viajeros operating, it is clear that a significant number of people work as viajeros in El Salvador, and that the majority provide services in rural areas. Some viajeros report that they carry as much as fifteen thousand dollars in cash and make as many as twenty-four trips a year. The viajeras are generally known to most people in their village; they operate by word of mouth and have their own clients and family members whom they serve, some for many years. They carry goods and food, money and messages between households in the United States and El Salvador. Typically they charge between four and five dollars for each pound of clothing and goods sent, or four dollars for every one hundred dollars remitted. As Alba, a Salvadoran immigrant in Northern Virginia, explained, If I want to send something to my mother, I do it through a viajera in whom I have a lot of trust. I do it because I want to be sure that the money gets right to my mother and that it is given to her directly, placed into her hands. But I also do it this way because I want to know how my mom is. How does she look? Is she well? Is she happy? The viajeras keep the ties

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

between us. They bring information, so that if you had to know, or even if you didn’t know that something was wrong, they help, they clarify things, they see how they can help us.

As more and more Salvadoran migrants regularize their immigration status in the United States, they seek to reunify family members or to bring them up for a vacation. Viajeras will also accompany a parent, a child, or a loved one with a legitimate tourist visa to the United States to make the journey easier and less daunting. Sometimes the viajeros and viajeras also act as intermediaries to resolve family conflicts and differences of opinion: “Sure,” explained another viajera from the San Miguel department, “I have tried to help people communicate better, to intervene with husbands and wives, with him there and her here. There are some things that can’t really be said on the phone.” Sending messages through the viajeros is particularly important for 219

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

el envío

a population that doesn’t write and has few resources to telephone. “I try and write everything down, because they often can’t,” a viajera noted. “But I have to be sure I have it right. Your aunt said this, your sister was concerned about that, your wife reminded you to do that. . . . I can’t forget these things, all the messages and greetings that I have to bring, they are what my clients pay for.” The goods, letters, pictures, and food that are exchanged are crucial for people whose movements are restricted, who may not be legally resident in the United States, or who do not have the resources to return home temporarily. Frequently food is prepared by wives, mothers, and sisters for a family member they have not seen in years. The gift sent from home is far more significant than the food item itself, as it may convey that family members are waiting for the migrants at home, cherishing their memories of time together, and sharing in an act that is both affective and fulfilling. Cooking for an absent husband whom you have not seen in years becomes a ritual that is carefully and methodically followed. Fresh fish that has been battered and fried will be carefully wrapped next to sweet-corn tamales and red beans and sent with queso cuajada, a crumbly, salted cheese produced in El Salvador and particularly valued in the eastern part of the country. These items will be delivered within a day or two at most to destinations throughout Virginia, Maryland, Texas, California, and New Jersey.7 Sending goods not only fulfills a vital connective role; it may also guarantee that family members in the North remain committed to sending remittances to the South, ensuring that the exchange continues by underscoring its reciprocity. Viajeros and viajeras clearly enact and maintain articulations of transnational cognitive space in El Salvador and in Greater dc. collective sending as fantastic citizenship Equally informal and multiply layered formations of transnational community are those described as collective remittances of the sort illustrated by Elvia and her Comité Tejar. Although idiosyncratic these groups begin among diaspora members who unite around a common filial or home community from which they may or may not actually originate. The 220

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

barbara burton and sarah gammage

community’s place is then extended over geographic boundaries, creating a philanthropic project that both reinforces and creates a new purposive feeling of community membership (Goldring 1996, 2002). In a highly stratified population only recently devastated by a long and bloody civil war, finding and building connections within the diaspora can be a delicate and awkward pursuit. Many such associations in Washington dc choose to skirt overt political identification to avoid these painful connections and concentrate on building churches, schools, and cemeteries. On the other hand, associations also appear to be emerging as points of advocacy in the United States for migrant rights, voter registration, and increasing influence in the Salvadoran elections. Salvadoran politicians now make visits to several of the more prominent groups in the United States and in the dc area to raise campaign money, votes, or letters home to encourage family members to vote.8 The United Community of Chinameca was formed over a decade ago after some residents of the Washington area traveled home at Christmas to that city. They were struck by the dilapidated state of the local church. “We decided to fix up the church, paint it and buy pews,” recalls Francisco Castro, a project manager. “We thought only about working on the church. But then we continued getting the letters and more requests from Chinameca. We started to gain fame by being able to send help from the United States.” One of the donors to Chinameca is Alfredo, a gardener and father who sends 20 percent of his paycheck to relatives at home. “Since God gave us this opportunity, I want to help my family,” he explains. He also wants to help his country, and he says he trusts Salvadoran clubs more than the Salvadoran government. “Even if it’s just a dollar, with the club I know it will get there,” he says (Sheridan 2001). Substituting for the state’s “traditional” responsibilities without a legal framework that acknowledges their rights, these projects represent affirmations of membership in both the communities and the political structure. Since neither actually exists on paper, however, they must be practiced in order to be made real. They become expressions of citizenship by proxy, mechanisms of social or fantastic citizenship, as it were. 221

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

el envío

The flattering opportunity to be courted by diplomats while working as a dishwasher keeps the struggle for membership highly compelling and contested. While geographic location or “hometown” provides one rallying point around which to organize, associations based on common ideological and religious beliefs also emerge and come to perpetuate and further realize these beliefs in profound ways. The Comité de Solidaridad Monseñor Romero has been functioning in dc since the 2001 earthquakes and has sent a substantial amount of aid back to El Salvador. Working with their members in the United States, the Comité sent back forty-five thousand pounds of dry food, medicine, and clothes in several large containers, provided more than thirty thousand dollars of plastic sheeting and bedding to earthquake victims, and purchased land in Usulután to build twenty houses in two communities. In addition to sending money to El Salvador, the committee also sent aid to Peru following the 2001 earthquakes there. They were also able to send ten thousand dollars of aid to earthquake victims in Gujarat, India, and they have been helping families survive the drought in several badly affected areas of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras. In this case the fundraising is not exclusively directed toward Salvadoran communities, but the committee members identify themselves in historically Salvadoran ways by seeing their work as in keeping with the vision and mission of Monseñor Romero.9 Expressing a particular political vision and coming to a new political consciousness also result from membership in these organizations. For example, in spite of their former status or their family’s perspectives back home, some immigrants become involved with Farabundo Martí para la Liberation National (fmln) activities after participating in union activity in their U.S. jobs. Others are inspired to become actively involved in political advocacy by the injustices they experience as immigrants.10 Thus, the identities of members of sending organizations in the United States are strongly shaped by the work of htas. The groups, as both sending and receiving sites, become greenhouses for new political and ideological formations, opportunities for maintaining or recreating 222

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

barbara burton and sarah gammage

social status and for expressing solidarity and support. They also become channels of both resistance and investment whose existence is disputed, tracked, and courted by development agencies, Salvadoran government leaders, and economists of all stripes. Membership in these fund-raising associations clearly builds community and dynamic nodes of meaning among many transnational actors (see, for example, Gammage 2006; Santillan 2004). They also signify demarcated zones of possibility to those entities seeking to exploit their resources, as well as to those who want to feel necessary, rich, or noble in the face of demoralizing circumstances. For struggling migrants who have made too many sacrifices and want something more meaningful for their efforts, the groups can provide opportunities to make transnational dreams come true. Blanca Cruz, a leader of Comité Pro Mejoramiento El Chiquirín, explains: We Salvadorians have an optimistic spirit, always willing to help and share [but] we believe that immigration is not the solution to El Salvador’s problems. It disintegrates families and leads to loss of human capital from communities and the country as a whole. In the end this loss leads us to bigger problems. We are now here to stay, but . . . the dream for us is to

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

help our country develop into a stable stage where every citizen will have education, jobs, a place to stay, healthcare, and all would have a worthy life. We must treat migrating as an option, not as a necessity. This is the reason why we spend endless volunteer hours to elaborate and deliver projects that go from cleaning streets, providing books, school supplies, toys, to opening roads, building and renovating schools, community and recreational centers, portable water. El Chiquirín did three projects; it was a wonderful experience, a dream that become a reality. (Cruz 2003)

Through this research we continue to join with other cross-disciplinary scholars who straddle their own transnational fields between the lands of research and advocacy, trying to understand and articulate how borders and communities are configured and crossed in meaningful ways during the twenty-first century. In this we must continue to consider how movements of people alter what people live for, what it means to belong, how 223

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

el envío

and to whom we feel responsible, and what small gift from here keeps them going there. Reflecting upon the sending within his own transnational family, Mario, a young man in rural La Union, explained it well: Why send these things back and forth? Ah . . . It is for tradition, it is to feel Salvadoran that the people up there ask for pupúsas and sweet-corn tamales. It is because they like to feel connected. For example, to send cheese . . . yes, of course they can go to a supermarket, or a Wal-Mart, they can buy cheese or whatever milk product. But to know the cheese is from here—that it is from the community where they were born, that’s different. My brother says it tastes better. He is in Boston. He said he had gone five years without eating real cheese. He was so happy to eat real cheese. Just cheese. Imagine that.

notes For their support and assistance in undertaking the research that informs this chapter we would like to acknowledge Diana Santillan, Corrie Drummond, Alison Paul, Sarah de Paz Castro, Marissa Guananja, Heidi Lindemann and the women’s studies department at George Washington University; Jim Wehmeyer, Manuel

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Benítez, Melany Machado, Eileen Applebaum, the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, the Ford Foundation, and the InterAmerican Foundation. 1. This and other ethnographic illustrations and interviews come from fieldwork undertaken among Salvadorans in Washington dc and in El Salvador from July 2003 to December 2004. 2. A more complete project overview and working papers were formerly available at Destination dc: http:www.rci.rutgers.edu/~migrate1 (accessed April 14, 2007). 3. See fisdl 2000; Orozco 2000; and N. C. Aizenman, “For Salvadoran Town’s U.S. Patrons, the Return Is More Than Financial,” Washington Post, March 14, 2006, a01. 4. Specific hometown associations included in our focus were the United Community of Chinameca, the Tejar Committee, the Comite Amigos Promejoramiento de El Chiquirin, and the Comite Pro Playa El Tamarindo in Virginia. 224

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

barbara burton and sarah gammage

5. Mary Beth Sheridan, “Regions’ Immigrants Building a Better Life—Back Home,” Washington Post, March 19, 2001, a1. 6. For a profound articulation of the impact on such separated mothers and children, see Bradley 2006. 7. See also L. Onofre and C. Ramírez, “Viajeros afectados por visa de tránsito a Estados Unidos,” La Prensa Gráfica, San Salvador, departamento 15, August 21, 2003, http://www.laprensagrafica.com/portada (accessed December 29, 2008). 8. See Keck and Sikkink 1998; Itzigsohn 2000; and Mary Jordan, “Cross Border Campaigning Muddles a Mexican Election,” Washington Post, September 9, 2001, a23. 9. Monseñor Archbishop Oscar Romero is widely recognized, particularly among Salvadorans, for his courage in speaking out against the government repression of the poor and the resisting peasants who fought against the Salvadoran military during the Salvadoran civil war. As a result of his stirring popular idealism and outspoken words, he was assassinated by government snipers in 1980 and remains a martyr and symbol to this day. 10. The fmln is the coalition of militias and organizations representing peasant interests that became a guerilla force allied against government repression during the civil war period. Since the 1992 peace accords, the alliance Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

has become a strong political party that seeks to represent the interests of rural, poor, and middle-class citizens (including labor unions) and elects candidates to all levels of the Salvadoran government.

references Alarcon, R. 2000. The development of home town associations in the U.S., and the use of social remittances in Mexico. In Sending money home, ed. R. de la Garza and B. L. Lowell, 101–24. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Andrade Eekhoff, K. 2001. Migración y capital social en El Salvador: Reflexiones con respecto al estado de la nación. Reporte preparado para el Informe de Desarrollo Humano en El Salvador 2001 del Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, El Salvador. Report for the United Nations Development Program. http://www.undp.org (accessed December 29, 2008). ———. 2003. Mitos y realidades: Un análisis de la migración en las zonas 225

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

el envío

rurales de El Salvador. Faculty of Latin American Social Sciences, Report for Broadening Access and Strengthening Input Market Systems/Collaborative Research Support Program (basis/crsp). http://www.ies.wisc.edu/ltc/live/ basann02.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008). Appadurai, A. 1992. Global ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, ed. R. Fox, 191–209. Santa Fe nm: sar Press. Boyce, J., and M. Pastor. 1997. Macroeconomic policy and peace building in El Salvador. In Rebuilding societies after civil war: Critical roles for intervention assistance, ed. Krishna Kumar, 287–314. London: Lynne Rienner. Bradley, Heather. 2006. Through their own lens: Children of the Salvadoran diaspora reveal and interpret migration in their lives. Destination dc Report 3. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~migrate1/research.htm (accessed December 29, 2008). Burton, Barbara. 2004. The transmigration of rights: Women, movement and the grassroots in Latin American and Caribbean communities. Development and Change 35 (4): 773–98. Cary, F. C. 1996. Urban odyssey: A multicultural history of Washington, D.C. Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution. Comisión Económica para America Latina (cepal). 1998. Uso productivo de Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

las remesas en El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras y Nicaragua. United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Santiago, Chile. http://www.eclac.org/default.asp?idioma=IN (accessed December 29, 2008). Council of Latino Agencies (cla). 2002. The state of Latinos in the District of Columbia: Trends, consequences, and recommendations. Washington dc: Council of Latino Agencies. Cruz, Blanca. 2003. Presentation on Salvadoran hometown associations, at the Culture and Global Affairs Forum, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, November 12. Desipio, L. 2000. Sending money home . . . for now: Remittances and immigrant adaptation in the United States. Inter-American Dialogue, Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, Washington dc. http://www.trpi.org (accessed December 29, 2008). 226

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

barbara burton and sarah gammage

Fondo de Inversión Social para el Desarrollo Local (fisdl) (Social Investment Fund for Local Development). 2000. Política para el apoyo estratégico de Salvadoreños en el exterior a los procesos de desarrollo local en El Salvador. Fondo de Inversión Social para el Desarrollo Local, San Salvador. http:// www.fisdl.gob.sv (accessed December 29, 2008). La Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social (fusades) (The Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development). 1996a. Encuesta desarrollo rural. Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social, Departamento de Estudios Económicos y Sociales, San Salvador, Julio. http://www.fusades.org.sv (accessed December 29, 2008). ———. 1996b. Uso productivo de las remesas familiares en El Salvador. Documento de Trabajo no. 42. San Salvador: fusades. http://www.fusades.org.sv (accessed December 29, 2008). Gammage, Sarah. 2004. Exercising exit, voice and loyalty: A gender perspective on transnationalism in Haiti. Development and Change 35 (4): 743–72. ———. 2006. Exporting people and recruiting remittances, a development strategy for El Salvador? Latin American Perspectives 33: 75–100. Goldring, L. 1996. Blurring borders: Constructing transnational community in the process of Mexico–U.S. migration. Research in Community Sociology 6:69–104. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

———. 2002. Re-thinking remittances: Social and political dimensions of individual and collective remittances. Working paper, York University, August. Inter-American Development Bank (idb). 2001. Report on remittances as a development tool: A regional conference. Inter-American Development Bank, May 18, Washington dc. http://www.iadb.org (accessed December 29, 2008). International Organization for Migration (iom). 1999. Migration in Central America puebla process: Hurricane Mitch, bases for reflection and proposals for action. Report of the International Organization for Migration, Consultative Group Meeting for the Reconstruction and Transformation of Central America, San José, Costa Rica, June. http://www.iom.int/jahia/jsp/ index.jsp (accessed December 29, 2008). Itzigsohn, J. 2000. Immigration and the boundaries of citizenship: The institutions of immigrants’ political transnationalism. International Migration Review 34 (4): 1126–54. 227

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

el envío

Keck, M., and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press. Landolt, P. 1997. Salvadoran transnationalism: Towards the redefinition of the national community. Working Paper 18, Johns Hopkins University, Program in Comparative and International Development. Levitt, P. 2001. The transnational villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lowell, B. L., and R. de la Garza. 2000. The development role of remittances in U.S. Latino communities and in Latin American countries: A final project report. Inter-American Dialogue and the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, Washington dc. http://www.thedialogue.org (accessed December 29, 2008). Mahler, Sarah J. 1995. American dreaming: Immigrant life on the margins. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press. Mahler, Sarah J., and P. Pessar. 2001. Gender and transnational migration. Paper presented at the “Transnational Migration: Comparative Perspectives” conference, Princeton University, June 30. Manning, R. 1996. Washington, D.C.: The changing social landscape of the international capital city. In Origins and destinies: Immigration, race, and ethnicity in America, ed. S. Pedraza and R. G. Rumbaut, 373–89. Washington dc: Wadsworth. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Massey, D. S. 1985. Ethnic residential segregation: A theoretical synthesis and empirical review. Sociology and Social Research 69:315–50. Menjívar, C. 2000. Fragmented ties: Salvadoran immigrant networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Migration Policy Institute. 2006. Migration information. http://www.migra tioninformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?ID=385 (accessed December 29, 2008). Newbold, K. B. 1999. Spatial distribution and redistribution of immigrants in the metropolitan United States, 1980 and 1990. Economic Geography 75:254–71. Orozco, Manuel. 2000. Latino hometown associations as agents of development. Inter-American Dialogue and the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, Washington dc. http://www.thedialogue.org (accessed December 29, 2008). Repak, T. 1995. Waiting on Washington: Central American workers in the nation’s capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 228

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

barbara burton and sarah gammage

Rivera-Salgado, G. 2000. Transnational political strategies: The case of Mexican indigenous migrants. In Immigration research for a new century, ed. N. Foner, R. G. Rumbaut, and S. J. Gold, 134–56. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Santillan, Diana. 2004. Service is like marriage: Gender discourse in a Salvadoran faith-based organization. Destination dc Working Paper 6. Schiller, N. G., L. Basch, and C.-S. Blanc. 1995. From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1): 48–63. Singer, A., S. Friedman, I. Cheung, and M. Price. 2001. The world in a zip code: Greater Washington D.C. as a new region of immigration. Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Brookings Greater Washington Research Program, Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings.edu (accessed December 29, 2008). ———. 2003. At home in the nation’s capitol: Immigrant trends in metropolitan Washington. Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Brookings Greater Washington Research Program, Brookings Institution. http://www .brookings.edu (accessed December 29, 2008). ———. 2005. The world settles in: Washington D.C. as an immigrant gateway. Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Brookings Greater Washington Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Research Program, Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings.edu (accessed December 29, 2008). Stoltz Chinchilla, N., and N. Hamilton. 1998. New organizing strategies and transnational networks of Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Paper presented at the 1998 Latin American Studies Association conference, Chicago, September 24–26. U.S. Bureau of Census. 2002. 2000 census summary file by state. United States Census Bureau, Quick Tables. http://www.census.gov (accessed December 29, 2008).

229

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

8. Global Indigenous Movements Convergence and Differentiation in the Face of the Twenty-First-Century State

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field scene: Mid-1990s, the Presidio of San Francisco, recently decommissioned by the U.S. Army, is now up for grabs by a myriad of powerful interest groups. Although a temporary charade put on by the Parks Service seems to offer an opportunity for indigenous Ohlones of the Bay Area to claim a place on the grounds where a cultural center and museum might be built, the property ends up in the hands of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Institute for Global Studies. A delegation of Hawaiian and Pacific Island Native peoples nonetheless dedicates a ceremonial carved pole made to honor the indigenous Ohlones at the Presidio. The ceremony is attended by representatives from the International Inter-Tribal Treaty Council and other representatives from indigenous communities all over the Americas. From Canada to Australia, from the United States to New Zealand, all over Latin America and the Pacific Islands, a global indigenous movement emerged in the closing decade of the twentieth century and continues to expand in the twenty-first. Common issues confront indigenous and aboriginal peoples across national boundaries in these vast regions; increasingly, similar perceptions of and discourse about these issues are being manifested among indigenous and ethnic minorities in Japan, China, Russia, India, North Africa, and the Celtic fringe of Europe, as well as elsewhere. The global indigenous movement is a transnational phenomenon par excellence, but half a decade into this new century, no social analyst could pretend that such phenomena are accompanied by the

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field

decline of the power of nation-states. Indeed, the enduring importance of national boundaries is being reproduced and constantly strengthened by national governments in control of the fierce machinery of the state. It is a much more complex situation than much post–cold war anthropological analysis, perhaps epitomized in Arjun Appadurai’s popular Modernity at Large (1996), had predicted in the heady early ’90s. For indigenous peoples the historical and historic moment in which their global struggle against colonialism and state-mandated disenfranchisement blossomed occurred at a real disjuncture, because the resurgence of unambiguous colonialism and big-stick nationalism in the new century came close on the heels of a process of economic globalization of both productive and finance capitalism. If this were not confusing enough, indigenous peoples themselves, notwithstanding their newfound global sensibilities, inherit their own sense of boundaries and borders among and between themselves, which persist and reanimate through their interactions with nation-states that are in the business of defining indigenous personhood and peoplehood. Recently, in a discussion of new books about Native North American, Maori, and Australian aboriginal cultural politics, I identified two broad areas of common indigenous struggle: sovereignty and representation (Field 2003). In another article (Field 2002), I looked at the other side of the coin—the policing of indigenous identities by nation-states—and compared the experiences of indigenous peoples in North versus Latin America. This article used fieldwork research I have conducted in indigenous communities in Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, and California, as well as the work of other anthropologists working in the Americas. This kind of comparative work cannot be considered strictly North Americanist or Latin Americanist scholarship, even though my ethnographic work has always been located in both regions. The anthropology I do, and that others who have contributed to this volume do as well, is not bounded geographically in the way “area studies” have seemed to imply. My current work is bounded instead by the factors I have described above. These factors compose a space-time matrix defined by (a) economic globalization; (b) pan-indigenous issues and struggles; (c) the control over 231

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

global indigenous movements

defining indigenous territories, communities, and bodies exercised by nation-states; and (d) the historico-cultural legacies of inter- and intraindigenous borders and identities. In this essay I extend this discussion both geographically and thematically, arguing that struggles over sovereignty and representation, the common global issues for indigenous peoples, have and will continue to both converge and differentiate. The actions of nation-states with respect to aboriginal and indigenous peoples are often so similar that it is hardly surprising to note a discursive and strategic convergence among diverse indigenous movements, a convergence that empirically forms the foundation of what is a global indigenous movement. By the same token the commodification of the material world under global capitalism and the undiminished sovereign power of nation-states over the material world within their national boundaries have frequently overwhelmed the solidarity of the pan-indigenous movement, while at the same time nationstates continue their several-hundred-year-old campaign of undermining the distinctive historico-cultural existence of each indigenous people. Under such conditions the sheer number of indigenous people inhabiting particular nations greatly affects strategic goals. In nation-states where indigenous peoples form minorities, they frequently seek local forms of sovereignty over sharply delimited spaces (reservations, reserves, and the like) and to represent themselves as distinctive and different from the national majority. But in nation-states where indigenous peoples form substantial populations, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, and in many ways New Zealand, they seek to reconfigure the nation itself, envisioning their sovereignty within a national identity represented as including indigenous history and culture. These differences complicate the strategic and discursive convergences and divergences within the global indigenous movement, and obligate a realization that notwithstanding a global struggle for indigenous sovereignty, the forms of sovereignty for which struggles are waged are substantively different. My discussion touches on three themes situated within the space-time matrix I have described and the dynamic between convergence and differentiation among indigenous movements around the world. The three 232

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

les w. field

themes are language, repatriation, and recognition. Of the three I have done the least intensive ethnographic work with language and the most with recognition. This no doubt affects the degree of intimate detail with which I am able to describe each theme. Naturally my most recent fieldwork research, centered in California, will be called upon to provide instructive examples in the discussion of each theme, but I will not neglect other areas of both others’ and my own ethnographic work.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

language

scene: Early twenty-first-century New Mexico, an “Indian taco” stand in Albuquerque, run by a family from Isleta Pueblo, who converse with one another in Tiwa while they sell fry bread. A Navajo man piles up bread, cakes, and other baked goods that he is buying. The Isleta woman comments, “Stocking up, huh?” He replies, “You know how we [unintelligible word] are.” She laughs, and in response to my confused face, she says, “That’s our [Tiwa] word for Navajo.” Then she turns to the man and, dead serious for an instant, asks, “How did you learn that word?” before easing the moment of tension with a laugh. For a moment the linguistic boundaries that separate Native American peoplehoods in the Southwest become clear to non-Native interlopers as well, reminding everyone that a common concern for indigenous language and identity is matched by the particular focus on one’s own community. An astonishing profusion of efforts to increase the population of speakers of Native languages throughout the Americas and much of the Pacific has blossomed in the last two decades. These efforts include publishing texts in these languages and reviving nearly moribund languages, such as nearly all California Indian languages, or even completely moribund languages, such as Miami (see Hinton 2000) and the various Ohlone languages formerly spoken in the San Francisco Bay Area. These efforts frequently embrace contemporary media such as radio and video, used to record, display, and broadcast the use of these languages. In many cases national governments have not only acceded to indigenous peoples’ demands in this regard but have formally acknowledged Native languages in legal and constitutional formats, and in some cases have provided more than nominal amounts of funding to support these efforts. In the United 233

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

global indigenous movements

States, the Native American Languages Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-477, cited in Hinton 1991) contains truly remarkable statements, which are worthwhile to excerpt: The status of the cultures and languages of Native Americans is unique, and the United States has the responsibility to act together with Native Americans to ensure the survival of the unique cultures and languages. . . . There is a widespread practice of treating Native American languages as if they were anachronisms. . . . Acts of suppression against Native American languages and cultures are in conflict with the United States policy of self-determination for Native Americans. . . . It is the policy of the United States to preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice and develop Native American languages.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

(Hinton 1991, 23)

The 1990 law was further elaborated in the Native American Languages Act of 1992, which established a grant program “to assure the survival and continuing vitality of Native American languages” (Hinton 1992). Such changes are not confined to the United States. In Colombia the new constitution of 1991 affirmed the right of indigenous peoples not only to the use of their languages in their own communities but also to the “official use of their languages” in their dealings with the government (Dover and Rappaport 1996, 8). The new constitution launched a widespread local effort by these communities to create bilingual pedagogies for indigenous children and adults. In Guatemala the peace process that ended that country’s decades-old civil conflicts led to recognition of the official status of the country’s twenty-four indigenous languages, in a 1998 reform of the National Constitution (Van Cott n.d.). Finally, in Ecuador, although Spanish remains the only official language in the country, Article 69 of the 1998 Constitution “explicitly recognizes a bilingual intercultural education system and maintains the use of the students’ native language as the main language to be used in their education and the use of Spanish as a language of intercultural relation” (República del Ecuador 1998). These legal, constitutional, and societal upheavals constitute victories whose importance should not be underestimated. In both the Anglophone 234

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field

and the Hispanic colonial countries, the superiority and hegemony of English and Spanish, respectively, was until very recently an unchallenged article of faith, and it still is for many of the powerful groups running these countries. Even a partial accession to Native sovereignty and autorepresentation over language indicates a shift in power relations, and that shift is part and parcel of the pan-indigenous moment in history. The very success of the models for indigenous language revitalization illustrates the global reach of indigenous solidarity on this issue: Hawaiian language activists, whose successful revitalization of their language is highly praised, have been invited to help formulate language programs for tribes all over California. According to Paul Tapsell, chief curator of the Auckland War Museum and an articulate Maori intellectual, the Hawaiian program was based on a successful program for Maori in New Zealand (see also Hinton 1994, 228–29), which itself was modeled on the Welsh language revitalization program.1 In this way pan-indigenous activism has served to reinforce languages that in themselves demarcate particular indigenous peoplehoods. By the same token it seems that, based on these achievements in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in the Anglophone colonial world, and in Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and doubtless elsewhere in Latin America, elite groups governing nation-states at the very least are not especially threatened at this point by the exercise of indigenous sovereignty over Native languages. It may be that many people in national governments who support or at least do not oppose a resurgence in indigenous languages cynically believe that such efforts will not amount to much. Just as likely this particular exercise of Native sovereignty is simply not perceived as threatening. Craig Howe, a Lakota scholar and activist, observes that very few if any nonspeakers of Lakota actually become fluent through school-based language programs, which in effect only help students who come to school already having learned to speak at home.2 In fact, in New Mexico many Pueblos actually oppose school-based language programs, arguing that the only appropriate place to learn Keres, Tiwa, Tewa, or Towa is in the home. Joe Watkins (Choctaw), a leading voice in the creation of archaeological 235

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

global indigenous movements

research directed by indigenous peoples in both the United States and Australia, agrees that accession to Native demands over language can be a relatively inexpensive and low-risk way for national governments to seem ready to redress historical injustices that indigenous peoples within their boundaries have suffered without acceding to far more risky demands over resources and territory.3 Nevertheless, in many important instances, such as in Hawaii and New Zealand, such programs have “worked,” and many more people speak their languages with varying degrees of fluency. Among the North American tribes experiences range from the grassroots parents’ movement at Akwesasne, which established the Mohawk language immersion program called the Akwesasne Freedom School, to the Mississippi Choctaw reservation, where economic success funds “the largest unified locally-controlled Indian school system in the country,” where bilingual education is a part of the curriculum.4 Official cynicism, if it has ever played a role, elides the strong supportive role indigenous language movements have played in indigenous sovereignty struggles, and clearly the pan-indigenous movement has proved important in supporting the technical and political significance of individual language revivals and resurgences. Notwithstanding such convergences of legal, constitutional, and administrative strategy worldwide, I remain mindful of the real differences between, on the one hand, indigenous peoples who, because they compose such large percentages of their nations’ populations, aim to reconstruct the national linguistic terrain by making indigenous languages official at the national level, and, on the other, those minority indigenous peoples who seek to strengthen and affirm their languages as spoken within much more localized boundaries. repatriation

scene: Early twenty-first century. Museums in Denmark and Sweden have successfully and encyclopedically repatriated human and artifactual remains of indigenous communities within their national or national-colonial borders. In the case of Denmark, this repatriation was made to the Inuit people of Greenland; in the case of Sweden, it was made to the Saami people, who are 236

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field

aboriginal to the far northern region of the country. Simultaneously, these museums deny that any precedent has been set by these repatriations, resisting any attempt by North American indigenous peoples, including those of California, to reclaim sacred artifacts in their collections. Compared to the case of indigenous language revitalization, for which global indigenous activism has provoked certain concessions over sovereignty on this issue from several nation-states, the issue of repatriation offers both resonant and divergent outcomes and processes. In several important instances nation-states have settled and are settling accounts with “their own” indigenous peoples, that is, those indigenous and aboriginal peoples located within their national or national-colonial borders. This accounting means the creation of processes by which certain groups of certain peoples may in certain cases apply to have certain objects and/ or human remains repatriated but only under certain conditions and with certain stipulations. In this regard, with the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra), the United States became one of the countries that has created a broader rather than narrower process for a greater range of indigenous peoples to begin repatriation processes—although the process is still extremely case specific. Fantastic victories, such as the return of the Zuni war gods (see Merrill, Ladd, and Ferguson 1993) or of the Omaha pole (see Ridington and Hastings 1997), seem to underscore the particularities of their cases rather than set replicable precedents. Every repatriation case seems to comprise a different universe. One reason is that museums and other institutions holding Native American skeletal and artifactual materials have responded to nagpra in divergent ways. Federal institutions of all kinds are obliged to undertake nagpra review processes, and the Smithsonian has taken the lead, particularly via the long-awaited opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. State institutions that receive federal funds, while similarly obliged, have not necessarily followed suit. My own experiences with the Hearst Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, were disconcerting; it seemed as if the museum’s administration had only very recently heard about nagpra and still suspected that this law might not apply to 237

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

global indigenous movements

them. A posting in 2002 on the University of California at Berkeley’s Web site describes the appointment of a new director of the Hearst Museum, acknowledging the former director as having brought the museum into nagpra compliance, a tacit admission of a delay in that process, to say the least.5 A recent critique of the University of California’s lack of compliance with nagpra, written by a Native American undergraduate at ucla, claims the university on all its campuses has “determin[ed] that the integrity of research is of more importance than protecting human rights” (Martin 2003, 4). Such claims could be disputed, but the point is that a great deal is still up for grabs in institutions such as the University of California system that control significant Native American skeletal and artifactual materials. Finally, in a critique of both sides in the debate over Alfred Kroeber, Ishi, and the Berkeley anthropology department, Karen Biestman (2003) takes to task those who would create an exploitative cult around Ishi, as well as the entire Berkeley department for resisting the repatriation movement, even years after nagpra was enacted. If such unevenness characterizes repatriation processes within individual nations such as the United States, which, as I have said, must be acknowledged as having some of the most progressive repatriation legislation in the world, the possibility of repatriation between nations faces even more obstacles. As in the repatriation processes in Sweden and Denmark to which I referred at the beginning of this section, nagpra’s relevance to indigenous peoples beyond the boundaries of the United States has been tightly constrained, although at the current time the possibilities for transnational repatriation are being explored in the dealings between the Smithsonian and a Maori delegation.6 Repatriation is thus a realm in which state sovereignty is not compromised, or only under very controlled circumstances and according to the rules set by nationstates. For that reason, I would argue, repatriation is an issue that can isolate indigenous groups from one another, each in a distinct struggle over particular objects and remains controlled by particular states and institutions, rather than becoming an arena in which the pan-indigenous movement can make a huge difference—at least not yet. In addition to the overarching ways that national laws shape repatriation 238

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field

battles such that indigenous peoples can take inspiration but not much else from one another’s victories and defeats, real differences among indigenous peoples in the ways they relate to material culture affect the significance of repatriation. There are at least three distinct types of repatriation struggles based on such a parameter. The first type involves the return of important objects to a people who are fully aware of the historical and cultural meaning of the objects and for whom the return of them is a revindication of a historical wrong. I would characterize the return of the Zuni war gods as this first type of repatriation. The second type also rectifies a historical wrong through the return of important objects, but the process of struggling for and ultimately achieving that return provokes a cultural reawakening or revitalization as the importance of the objects in question is once again understood and internalized. In the United States the return of the Omaha pole beautifully illustrates this second type of repatriation. In the same vein, in New Zealand Paul Tapsell (2000) has written perceptively about the return of Pukaki to the Ngati Whakaue Maori tribe. The third type is also a revindication, but in this case, the meaning of the object or objects has been decisively lost, due to the long-term effects of colonialism, forced assimilation, language loss, and so on, and while the return of the objects establishes or fortifies a cultural patrimony for the people in question, the significance of the objects must be created anew. This kind of repatriation describes the efforts of indigenous peoples, such as the Ohlones of the San Francisco Bay Area, for whom I work, who have been severely marginalized by the nation-states that occupy their aboriginal territories, to the extent of denying such peoples even the limited benefits of official recognition, a phenomenon I will discuss in more detail in the next section. It is important to recognize that with respect to the first two kinds of repatriation such important objects are actually not objects from the indigenous point of view. They are sacred entities, sentient beings in many cases, with histories and destinies that intertwine with but remain distinct from the indigenous peoples who want them back. When an object is regarded as this sort of being, the character of the repatriation struggle 239

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

global indigenous movements

is quite different compared to a struggle for cultural patrimony that does not retain such a sentient existence. I am not diminishing the importance or intensity of the latter kind of struggle—far from it. Yet it is important to realize that different sorts of repatriation struggles are being waged, not only because of the differences between national legislation around the globe but also because the objects in question are not all of one kind. Indeed, the importance of both of these factors is highlighted by the realities faced by unacknowledged peoples such as the Ohlones, for whom their status signifies the loss of sacred objects, the loss of the knowledge of their sacredness, and the ineligibility to reclaim them by whatever limited means have been legislated for repatriation.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

recognition

scene: Mid-1990s, an office building in downtown San Jose, California, tribal headquarters of the Muwekma Ohlone, a federally unacknowledged tribe. Representatives of several local unacknowledged tribes sit around a table with a large map of the San Francisco Bay Area and environs before them, discussing the boundaries of their aboriginal territories. Although most of these territories are now covered by freeways, shopping centers, and urban sprawl inhabited almost entirely by nonindigenous peoples, they contest one another’s claims to certain areas that they will incorporate into their federal-acknowledgment petitions. Recognition presents an even more complex and multilayered picture, and here too vast differences between national histories—with respect to the sovereign powers of nation-states, as well as the historical relationships between indigenous groups within a given national territory— condition the possible room for maneuver for the global pan-indigenous movement. Certain national histories are characterized by the making and signing of treaties between the state and indigenous peoples, while others are not. This factor has been intrinsic to both the official recognition of indigenous peoples and the nature of their sovereignty within particular nation-states, and in that light I will consider several cases that exemplify a range of such relationships. One end of this range is illustrated by Hawaii, which was, to be sure, 240

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field

not only populated by indigenous people but actually composed an indigenous nation-state: first a kingdom, then a republic. The Hawaiian nation-state was militarily dominated and then annexed by an imperialist colonial power, the United States, via a treaty. Thus the model of official recognition and limited sovereignty that regulates these relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes on the mainland insufficiently addresses Hawaii’s actual history. Legislation that would create a Native Hawaiian governing entity, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, or Akaka Bill, would specifically redress the disenfranchisement of indigenous Hawaiians.7 This injustice was already officially recognized by President Clinton in 1993, in an apology (United States Public Law 103-150) for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. A plethora of groups is struggling to go much further than what would be established by these acts of Congress and to reestablish an independent state in the islands. What happens in Hawaii reverberates across the Pacific. In New Zealand the relationship between Maori peoples and the nation-state, similar to that of Native Americans in the United States, has been defined by the Treaty of Waitangi, and in many ways the formally recognized status of Maori people has a remarkable and weighty legal formality with respect to sovereignty, territory, and increasingly representation. At this juncture in history, the range of issues over which Maori tribes are exercising sovereignty is indexically referenced to the authority of the Treaty of Waitangi. In the United States itself distinct periodizations of relations between indigenous peoples and federal authority have shaped a complex history of recognition and sovereignty. Across the land some indigenous peoples were forcibly relocated, some allocated a portion of their aboriginal territory as reservations, and some denied official status altogether. Such status, which we call “recognition,” came about as a result of a hopelessly complex welter of treaties and major policy shifts that occurred over the last two and a quarter centuries. In the case of California, treaties are irrelevant because those that were negotiated were never approved by the U.S. Senate; the very few reservations established are located according to the military exigencies of controlling Indian peoples; other trust 241

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

global indigenous movements

territories came into existence as something like labor camps; and many Indian peoples were subjected to erasure by being ignored by federal and state authorities. In other parts of the country, recognition was denied to or withdrawn from various groups for a variety of reasons, especially after the Indian Reform Act of 1934 and the efforts to terminate tribes in the 1950s. Be that as it may, all over the United States a large number of indigenous peoples are not federally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia), a branch of the Department of the Interior. Many have become embroiled in the onerous, wildly expensive, and deeply compromised Federal Acknowledgment Process (fap) to obtain a severely delimited sovereignty over some kind of home territory as well as, sadly, to gain access to the always substandard yet nevertheless significant federal apparatus responsible for providing health, education, housing, and other services to the people on whose territories this country sits. The many tribes involved in the fap try to utilize the precedents set by the few tribes that have successfully navigated the process and been awarded recognition. This is a more or less standard way of using the legal record in this country, but in some cases certain tribes have assumed an explicit leadership role in organizing large numbers of unrecognized tribes to negotiate the fap together. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe, for whom I work, has done exactly that. Muwekma’s leadership has been important, but Muwekma’s petition received a negative determination from the bia in 2001, forcing the tribe to turn to a judicial strategy. Hidden and powerful forces, such as the hydra-headed casino industry, play a major role in the machinations of the fap, constricting the leadership of Muwekma or other tribes and their ability to play a role at the national level. If the intertribal movement for recognition at the national level is so deeply constrained in the United States, at the international level indigenous peoples can do little more than encourage one another. The case of Australia’s aboriginal peoples illustrates the difficulties facing indigenous peoples who do not have any treaties whatsoever shaping the possibilities for recognition and sovereignty. In the absence of treaties aboriginal peoples since the 1970s have achieved some limited victories in the courtroom, but the resulting ill-defined recognition processes have proven 242

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

les w. field

precarious in the face of changing politics at the executive and local levels (see Povinelli 2002). In Latin America indigenous movements in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, and of course the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army) in Mexico also seek forms of official recognition from the national government, which would facilitate indigenous sovereignty over territories and resources as well as autorepresentation. As in the Anglophone world, this is a primary area of pan-indigenous cooperation, communication, and support, and similarly an arena in which particular national histories and their intersection with particular processes of treaty-making, bureaucratization, forced removal and genocide, and military occupation are in every instance shaping the kinds of recognition that result. Whatever those outcomes may be, I have hypothesized (Field 2002) that in Latin America the victories indigenous movements may achieve with respect to recognition, sovereignty, and territory will signal increased interest on the part of nation-states in certifying, regulating, and policing who is and is not indigenous. This seems inevitable and makes the example of the United States—for better and for worse—once again a relevant one for all indigenous peoples engaged in processes of obtaining official recognition. The implications of such regulation and the policing of indigenous identities using anthropological knowledge, fieldwork, and the labor of anthropologists themselves are very significant issues that cannot be explored here. Because anthropological knowledge has historically played an important role in determining the authenticity of indigenous identities and therefore their official status within particular nation-states, the relationships between anthropologists and local indigenous peoples and the global indigenous movement will continue to be profoundly intertwined.

scene: Driving through the Salinas Valley, a rich agricultural region located south of the San Francisco Bay Area, one sees fields of artichokes, strawberries, broccoli, and lettuce extending eastward and westward from Highway 101, which bisects the terrain. Travelers who exit the highway and stop in the shopping centers, restaurants, and local stores in the small cities of this valley will 243

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

global indigenous movements

hear Zapotec, Mixtec, Trique, and other indigenous languages of the Mexican state of Oaxaca spoken as much or increasingly more than Spanish. The 2000 census (see Lopez 2002) reports that “Latin American indigenous peoples” are now the second largest indigenous group in the state of California, outnumbered only by those who identify as Cherokee, and of course far more numerous than any of California’s own Native peoples. Who can blame the anthropologists of the 1990s for not always hitting their mark in their analyses of globalization? So much of what has happened and continues to unfold seems paradoxical. Beyond the movements of international finance capital or the ways the largest multinational corporations mobilize the cheapest labor forces across the face of the planet to always extract the greatest possible surplus value, the nature of globalization is complex, unpredictable, and dynamic. The Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, and other indigenous peoples who labor for North American agribusiness occupy a space of disjuncture and anomaly. As immigrants they can never become officially recognized indigenous peoples in the United States, while in Mexico there is no forum for or value to being a “recognized” Indian person or people. In Mexico the legacy of a century of indigenismo means that Indian cultural patrimonies belong to the entire Mexican nation rather than to any kind of indigenous entity. But although the Mexican cultural bureaucracy controls the material culture of indigenous peoples, one of the effects of so many indigenous Oaxacans living in California has been the strengthening of indigenous identities and the use of indigenous languages back home in Oaxaca. A growing number of indigenous authors are using indigenous languages as a platform for an increasingly sophisticated and diverse cultural renaissance (see Montemayor and Frischman 2005). Global political movements such as the international indigenous movement are particularly elusive in character, as each nation-state undergoes processes of historical transformation and indigenous peoples themselves exchange ideas and experiences and move and migrate within national territories and across national frontiers. It is clear that during this era of globalization, the nation-state will continue to constitute the main terrain of struggle for indigenous peoples. But like the composition 244

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

les w. field

of the indigenous population in California and elsewhere, local terrains will continue to mutate, leading to situations in which struggles over indigenous language, repatriation, recognition, and other issues will have growing global significance. notes 1. Paul Tapsell, pers. comm., May 2003. 2. Craig Howe, pers. comm., May 2003. 3. Joe Watkins, pers. comm., December 2004. 4. For the Akwesasne Freedom School, see http://pages.slic.com/mohawkna/ freedom.htm (accessed April 15, 2007). See also http://www.choctaw.org (accessed April 15, 2007). 5. The uc, Berkeley, Web site can be found at http://www.berkeley.edu/news. 6. Paul Tapsell, pers. comm., May 2003. 7. Regarding the Akaka Bill, see http://www.nativehawaiians.com.

references Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Biestman, Karen. 2003. Ishi and the university. In Ishi in three centuries, ed. K. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Kroeber and C. Kroeber, 146–58. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dover, Robert, and Joanne Rappaport. 1996. The construction of difference by native legislators. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1 (2): 22–45. Field, Les. 2002. Blood and traits: Preliminary observations on the analysis of Mestizo and indigenous identities in Latin vs. North America. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7 (1): 2–33. ———. 2003. Dynamic tensions in indigenous sovereignty and representation: A sampler. American Ethnologist 30 (3): 447–53. Hinton, Leanne. 1991. The Native American languages act. News from Native California 5 (2): 22–23. ———. 1992. Keeping the languages alive: The tribal scholars language conference. News from Native California 6 (4): 25–31. ———. 1994. Flutes of fire: Essays on California Indian languages. Berkeley ca: Heyday Books. 245

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

global indigenous movements

———. 2000. Language is life: The fourth biannual gathering. News from Native California 13 (4): 4–9. Lopez, Alejandra. 2002. The largest American Indian populations in California: Household and family data from the census 2000. Demographic Report 7. Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University. http://ccsre.stanford.edu/reports/report_7.pdf, (accessed January 1, 2009). Martin, Lucius. 2003. uc places higher value on research than human rights. Paper, American Indian studies, University of California Los Angeles. Merrill, William L., Edmund J. Ladd, and T. J. Ferguson. 1993. The return of the Ahayu:da: Lessons for repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution. Current Anthropology 34:523–67. Montemayor, Carlos, and Donald Frischman, eds. 2005. Words of the true peoples: Anthology of contemporary Mexican indigenous language writers. Austin: University of Texas Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The cunning of recognition. Durham nc: Duke University Press. República del Ecuador. 1998. Constitución política de la República del Ecuador. Gaceta Constitucional del Ecuador (June). Quito. Ridington, Robin, and Dennis Hastings. 1997. Blessings for a long time: The sacred pole of the Omaha tribe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Tapsell, Paul. 2000. Pukaki: A comet returns. Auckland: Reed Books. Van Cott, Donna Lee. n.d. Latin American constitutions and indigenous peoples. Paper, Department of Political Science, University of Tennessee.

246

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

9. What Can Americanists and Anthropology Learn from the Alliances between Indigenous Peoples and Popular Movements in the Amazon?

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

lêda leitão martins In 1642 the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo called for the formation of a union among Indians to match the one among the English: “Are we all Indians as the English are, and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly” (Cronon 1983, 163). The fulfillment of Miantonomo’s exhortation in the current context of indigenous politics in the Americas is the topic of this essay. I argue that it might not be possible or desirable for indigenous peoples— because of the contingency of pan-indigenous identification processes and particular colonial encounters—to unify with other Indians to the exclusion of non-Indian groups. The Narragansett sachem was certainly not thinking of a unity that included all tribes of North America, let alone all the Americas. His discourse was addressed to the tribes of New England that confronted the colonists at that moment. In the last five hundred years the presence of Europeans has been resisted or accommodated mostly in a tribal manner, in fragmented and diverse ways that mirror the differences between indigenous peoples themselves and the different forms of interactions they developed with colonial powers. Attempts to create broad coalitions among Indian peoples, however, are found throughout history. In North America those examples include Pontiac’s rebellion and its leader, “the Delaware Prophet”; the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea); the brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

what can americanists learn?

of the Shawnees; and perhaps most impressive, the effort to institute an Indian commonwealth in Oklahoma by the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles with other tribes (Hertzberg 1971). Religious leaders have also attempted to create pan-Indian movements such as the Ghost Dance (Hertzberg 1971). Pan-Indian initiatives have become more inclusive in their discourse, at least as trade, communication, and politics begin to link distant groups. Hazel Hertzberg predicted in the early 1970s that “the sector of the Indian population from which PanIndian movements have historically risen [would] probably grow in size and importance” (1971, 321). In great part this would happen because, in her view, “Pan-Indian movements in their modern accommodative form have represented a characteristic aspect of Indian relationships to the larger society and among each other throughout this century. Despite fluctuations in the significance and impact of particular types at particular periods, Pan-Indianism has shown itself to be remarkably durable, deeply rooted in Indian historical experience, and capable of considerable flexibility” (320). The appearance of indigenous umbrella organizations such as coica (Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin) and growing alliances among different indigenous groups in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to confirm Hertzberg’s prediction. Indigenism in the Amazon and the Americas in general seemed to have progressed in the last decades in the direction of Pan-American Indian alliances and toward, perhaps, a Pan-American Indian identity. This tendency, of course, parallels the transnational flows of capital, information, and politics, but it derives in particular from the collaboration between the multiple indigenous movements in Latin America and environmental and human rights organizations in the North, in which anthropologists have been important players. Against the current of Pan-Americanism, new political initiatives taking place among some indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon point perhaps to the strengthening of local politics among Indian groups but most importantly between Indians and non-Indians. These are not the urban, educated elites who have traditionally supported indigenous 248

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

lêda leitão martins

struggles (Conklin and Graham 1995; Ramos 1982) but rather poor and marginalized national groups. The Kayapó have begun working with Brazilian nongovernmental organizations and with other popular movements to oppose once more the construction of a dam on the Xingu River (Turner and Fajans-Turner 2006). Another of these indigenous peoples is the Macuxi, a Carib-speaking group that lives in the northern Amazon, on the border between Brazil and Guyana. I discuss the Macuxi case in more detail below. It is impossible to predict now the full implications of these incipient alliances, or even whether they will last, but their existence raises some interesting questions for the study of indigenous societies and the engagement of researchers with indigenous movements. Are Indians moving away from “cultural politics”? If so, what will be the basis for these new alliances? And if indigenous politics decenters culture, how would anthropology redefine Indians as subjects? What is the place for anthropologists, especially anthropologists in North America, in this new scenario of regional politics? I now turn to a brief consideration of ways these issues have emerged in the experiences of the Macuxi.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

discovering brazil In April 2000, when the Brazilian government celebrated the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of Brazil, some Macuxi leaders from the northernmost Amazon crossed almost the entire country to protest five centuries of brutal treatment and displacement by the Portuguese and later by the Brazilians. The Macuxi, who in the last thirty years have articulated an impressive comeback from a situation of great physical and cultural oppression, joined indigenous groups from all over Brazil on that occasion. The final march, after days of a political and cultural intertribal summit, turned into a governmental fiasco when hundreds of members of the landless movement entered the protest and the police attacked the peaceful protesters with rubber bullets and tear-gas bombs. It was the perfect reflection of a relationship marked by fear, violence, and deceit. “The landless people came with their red flags from side streets and mixed with us, and when the police saw the red, they attacked; I have 249

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

what can americanists learn?

noticed that the police do not like red,” Severino, a Macuxi headman, explained to me when he returned from the trip. To my surprise the Macuxi came back talking not so much about the other Indians but about other Brazilians. That journey had been in many ways a new one for them; they seemed to have themselves discovered modern Brazil. Active participants in transnational politics, a couple of the Macuxi travelers had been to Europe and the United States but had never traveled by bus through the interior of Brazil, much less into its poorest region, the northeast. “Dona Lêda, we saw people so poor that they live in little shacks by the roads. They had no land to cultivate a single manioc plant,” reported a Macuxi lady who had visited Italy and the Vatican on a tour to promote the Macuxi struggle for land and indigenous rights. In the weeks that followed, several Macuxi commented about different aspects of their experience, adding, refining, and sometimes imagining details about the life of dispossessed people they had found along the way. The Macuxi represent a successful case of cultural revitalization and physical survival made possible by the type of national and international political mobilization that assumes different tones but shares the fact that they have become the main weapon of indigenous resistance in the last decades. Thirty years ago the Macuxi were called caboclos, which in Brazilian Amazonia is the term used to refer to people of white and Indian descent, to “civilized” Indians (i.e., to Indians who are no longer true Indians), and to the poor in general, especially servants. In the last decade the Macuxi have carved out a respectful place in the indigenous national political scene, and in 2005 they had their territory—the size of Delaware and Connecticut together—finally recognized by a presidential decree although the entire political class and most of local society opposed it. The triumph of the Macuxi movement rests in their ability to construct political alliances with other Indians and with non-Indians. These alliances differ in nature. The first, with other Indians, is one of peers, invoked in the name of a brotherhood, historically forged in most cases but nevertheless assuming an air of cultural commonality (although not of empirical similarities in many cases), with racial overtones. The second, with non-Indians, is cast as one among partners of not only different 250

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

lêda leitão martins

social, educational, and economic backgrounds, but of culturally and racially divergent natures (Conklin and Graham 1995; Jackson 1989). If collective actions post-1960 in Latin America and elsewhere are interpreted by the proponents of new social movement theories as the politics of culture in contrast to classical class struggles, indigenous movements tend to be viewed as the very expression of culture. Indigenous politics, especially in the Amazon, have been represented as constructed around and mediated through the notion of culture and tradition. Geographic proximity and some common cultural features have aided the creation of alliances, as is the case of the Macuxi and the Wapixana, groups distinct linguistically but with similar material culture and cosmological beliefs.1 Indigenous groups have undeniably engaged in the revitalization of cultural expressions and knowledge, and they have used culture in discourses and actions to call attention to their political causes. However, not all people who could claim an indigenous identity have done so; some groups, in the Andean region, for example, have pursued their struggles on the grounds of their main economic activities—as peasants, fishing communities, and so forth (Starn 1999). Alliances, of course, follow cultural patterns, and they have meanings to all actors involved and to those observing from a distance. To stick with the Kayapó case, Terence Turner interprets the famous 1988 Altamira meeting both as the culmination of tribal politics in the face of a common enemy and as the ceremonial enactment of and for social renovation and tribal unification (Beckham 1989). The reasons for the union of the Macuxi and the Wapixana—formal but not so distant enemies—emphasize even more the historical contingency of indigenous politics. To this day the grandfathers of Wapixana leaders whisper to them about the dangers of working with the Macuxi, the enemy other. For them the historical eventuality of this alliance seems evident and perhaps temporary. But the Macuxi political movement and its intertribal alliances appear to others as the natural outgrowth of an assumed cultural identity realized through a process of political consciousness and not as the cultural product of the politicizing process experienced by the Macuxi and their neighbors. In the Amazon Basin, at least in Brazil, culture and ethnicity 251

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

what can americanists learn?

have been made into central forces in the political, economic, and social mobilization of indigenous peoples. I am speaking here of Indian leaders, activists, local intellectuals, and academics who have contributed to the view that indigenous political actions are the result of unique aspects of their particular ways of life and knowledge or that the movements are crucial means to revitalize or protect these cultures. As a consequence culture becomes reified in some practices and discourses, and in others it is interpreted as an opportunistic strategy employed by indigenous peoples to gain political power. Anthropologists have contributed to the maintenance of both views. In the last decades indigenous peoples have benefited from the political attention and financial aid of institutions and people from the educated middle and upper classes of urban centers, usually located far from Indian villages. Important alliances between Indians and environmentalists were formed from the 1980s on, despite the discrepancies in their respective notions of nature, culture, and development (Conklin and Graham 1995; Brown 1993; Jackson 1994). Complementary to the idea of Indians as natural defenders of the rainforests and other natural habitats is the notion that Indians will, if given the opportunity, identify and ally with other Indians, or even that a group of Indian leaders can unproblematically represent all indigenous societies. International forums and numerous umbrella organizations, such as coica, have been created under those assumptions.2 I have witnessed several attempts to bring together leaders from the Amazon and representatives of the Inuit, the Iroquois, and other northern groups. Although these occasional meetings allow the exchange of rich information and create emotional bonds between leaders, they rarely develop into long-lasting relations with sufficient force to alter local realities of inequality and disempowerment. Moreover, some Indians have bluntly rejected alliances with other tribes, recognizing neither cultural nor political commonalities between them. I have heard tales from Indian leaders about the Kayapó blocking the entrance to a government minister’s office to prevent other groups from entering a meeting with them: “The Kayapó say they are ‘true’ Indians, and they do not like to mix 252

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

lêda leitão martins

with the rest of us,” explained Jacir de Souza, one of the most important Macuxi leaders, after he returned from a visit to Brasilia some years ago. In the context of transnational economic treaties, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the now-feared Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, that threaten the livelihood of Indians and other marginalized groups and of international forums and movements that attempt to protect them, I find intriguing the appearance of regional alliances between groups of people that until now have been somewhat at odds. In Brazil Indians and rural workers and labor unions have shown little appreciation and knowledge of each other’s struggles. Within the practice and analysis of social movements, it is the interests of Indians, on one side, and those of workers, the landless, and the homeless, on the other, that have been seen as unrelated and even conflicting. So why these alliances now? And more important, do the new alliances represent a departure from the attempts toward intertribal unification as sought by Miantonomo? Is the quest for a pan-Indian movement dead? The work of the Catholic Church, in the case of the Macuxi, to unite the struggles of Indians and popular groups is a major reason for the formation of the We Exist movement, which is sponsored by the local diocese. “We” refers to the dispossessed: Indians (rural and urban), union members, rural workers, poor neighborhood associations, the landless, and alliances of street people. Following the expedition to the site where the first Portuguese arrived and the experience of the frustrated protest against the celebration of five hundred years of violence and abuses against the indigenous population, the Macuxi organization—the Indigenous Council of Roraima—joined a campaign in 2002 for “life and dignity in the state of Roraima,” labeled nós existimos, or “We Exist.” This coalition is clearly a new strategy to address old problems. While the Catholic Church can be blamed by local authorities for one more insurgent initiative, the Macuxi are genuinely engaged in the We Exist movement (and they do not take interest in all of the church’s programs). Perhaps the failure of the state to fulfill its promises to new immigrants to the Amazon and the limited impact of international support for indigenous rights can help to explain this new type of brotherhood.3 253

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

what can americanists learn?

The collaboration between Indians and local non-Indians focuses on common concerns, such as security, education, health, and dignity, in contrast to the more distant, abstract, and idealized interests that Indians might share with international support groups and urban intellectuals. The discourse of these new regional alliances recognizes the cultural differences of the groups involved but tends to look beyond culture to emphasize common desires for social justice and equality. The new alliances do not invoke cultural brotherhood, with its dangerous hints of racialization of Indian identity, but rather appeal to shared experiences of exploitation and marginalization. The Macuxi, the homeless, and the new immigrants are also engaging in abstraction and imagination when they proclaim their common suffering. The novelty of these new alliances is that they escape, for the Macuxi at least, the confinement of cultural/racial categories that have posed a crucial problem for Indians in Brazil: having to choose either being considered full members of the modern Brazilian nation or their Indian identity. Being part of a coalition not based on culture/race might allow excluded groups to challenge directly the economic and social foundations of exclusion in Brazil and perhaps expose how poverty intersects with racialized assumptions. At the same time such a strategy permits the Macuxi to evade the reification of the notion of Indianness by which living peoples are compared against an intangible but always present image of the “real” Indian and, as a consequence, against one another. And although the Macuxi have appealed to traditional images of Indianness in their quest for land rights in national and international campaigns, they feel the limiting effects of such notions. the macuxi and anthropologists For the last thirty years the Macuxi have engaged in a successful movement to gain control of their territory and reclaim their Indian identity. As mentioned above, in the 1960s the Macuxi were considered caboclos by the local elite and the government. In the 1990s the Macuxi were recognized nationally and internationally as one of the best-organized Indian groups in Brazil for having expelled most of the invaders from their 254

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

lêda leitão martins

lands and revitalizing their communities. The Macuxi movement seeks the “preservation of their culture,” as they express it. Also the Macuxi, like other Indian groups, effectively use cultural symbols in their discourse, actions that appeal to Western notions of Indianness and to the texts of national laws that protect indigenous rights. But the Macuxi movement has also opposed their insertion into an unequal social system that attempts to place them on the very bottom. When the Macuxi rejected the label of caboclos, they were not only reclaiming an ethnic identity but also evading their offered place in Brazilian society as maids and peons. The Macuxi movement is thus not only a movement toward ethnicity but also a struggle against a rigid social and economic stratification that threatens to swallow them.4 Roraima is almost certainly the state most hostile to Indians in the Amazon. The state government invests heavily against the demarcation of indigenous territories, violence against the indigenous population is institutionalized, and there is widespread prejudice against and opposition to Indian rights among the local society. The Macuxi have received significant and relevant support from the Catholic Church, from national organizations in southern Brazil, and from international institutions in the United States and Europe. They have also been very active in the political articulation among indigenous organizations regionally and nationally. But the We Exist campaign is the first open support that members of the local society, other than the church, have offered indigenous peoples in Roraima. It remains to be seen if growing local coalitions have the power to inhibit violence and discrimination against Indians. Anthropologists working with indigenous peoples in Latin America in the last three or four decades have almost inevitably become involved in their political struggles, even when politics has not been the focus of their research. That involvement is, of course, a consequence of the politicization of the Indians. The great majority of anthropologists who engage in local politics do so to assist indigenous peoples in their claims for land, autonomy, and security. Anthropologists from or in North America have been particularly important in mobilizing international attention and financial help for indigenous organizations and movements in Latin 255

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

what can americanists learn?

America.5 The engagement of anthropologists with indigenous movements in the South has produced a large number of ethnographies and academic articles in the North. Some anthropologists, such as Bruce Albert, who works with the Yanomami in Brazil, have called for and even predicted that the study of Indian societies will soon invariably require political and intellectual involvement with local struggles (Albert 1997). Albert seemed to think that only indigenous peoples will be the actors in those “local struggles.” I suggest that anthropologists might have to deal with a variety of actors who are not united on the basis of ethnic identity. The anthropology of the Amazon has been organized around the study of single tribes; anthropologists become specialists on a given people to the point that anthropological inquiry mirrors the politics of culture, that is, it tends to crystallize and reify culture. A particular culture therefore becomes not only the object of study but also a necessary condition for the existence of research and the basis of academic careers. Perhaps it is necessary to (re)conceptualize the local in the Amazon and in indigenous politics. David Slater has suggested that we add “spatial imagination” to the “cultural framing of ‘doing politics’” (1998, 381), which is an insightful idea for the situation in question. The immediate future might present a different ethnographic reality, one that mixes an idea of Indians as political actors in the context of relations with distant partners for the protection of their culture and environment, a process in which culture itself becomes naturalized and one that recognizes them as new allies with regional groups of non-Indians for the use of land and natural resources to struggle against poverty and exclusion. Engaging in politics outside the boundaries of Indianness will perhaps allow indigenous peoples to surpass the constraints that culture has imposed on them. Indians might be able to retain their identity as a distinct group while becoming at the same time full citizens of Brazil. This departure from cultural struggles, in parallel fashion, might push anthropologists to expand their conceptualization of ethnographic research and help to free them from the limitations of single-culture studies. I am not suggesting that transnational politics and collaborations will become irrelevant or even disappear. I question, however, if those types 256

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

lêda leitão martins

of relations and actions are sufficient and if a Pan-American indigenism is possible or desirable. Dialogue and support between indigenous peoples have been extremely important in their struggles against inequality and oppression. The Macuxi and the Wapixana jointly constructed the Indigenous Council of Roraima and have struggled together for several decades; perhaps because of these joint undertakings they have a better understanding of their unnatural process of collaboration. Perhaps by traveling far and wide, by expanding their horizons beyond the Amazon and Brazil, by penetrating international spheres of activism, the Macuxi and others have realized that the solution to their problems is also close to home. In this potential new geopolitics, we anthropologists might need to redirect our mediating position from liaisons between Indians and the intellectual urban West, and between the impoverished South and the rich North, to participation in dialogues within the South, between Indians and other marginalized national groups. Otherwise we might, as Albert alerts us, become irrelevant to the study of cultural and social changes in the Americas. Finally, if Amazonian Indians engage in other than cultural politics, anthropology might have to redefine its notions of culture and its relationship to some of its most traditional subjects. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

notes Steve Rubenstein and Dan Segal made valuable comments on this essay. Kathy Fine-Dare was a patient, persistent, and careful editor. I would not have completed the essay without her encouragement. 1. The Wapixana are an Arawak group that share with the Macuxi the same geographic and political space. 2. In Brazil there have been two major umbrella organizations for indigenous groups: one in Brasília (Conselho de Articulação dos Povos e Organizações Indígenas do Brasil, capoib [Council for the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples and Organizations of Brasil]) and the other in the Amazon (Coordenação das Organizações Indígenas da Amazonia Brasileira [Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon]). capoib is no longer functioning. 257

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

what can americanists learn?

3. The growing accusations of the internationalization of the Amazon by the military and right-wing politicians in Brazil seem to be responsible for bureaucratic difficulties in the implementation of international projects within indigenous territories. 4. A similar argument has been made by other scholars, such as Ortner (2003) and Segal (1998). 5. Terence Turner is the main example, but not the only one, that comes to mind.

references Albert, Bruce. 1997. “Ethnographic situation” and ethnic movements: Notes on post-Malinowskian fieldwork. Critique of Anthropology 17 (1): 53–65. Beckham, Michael, dir. 1989. The Kayapo: Out of the forest. vhs. Disappearing World series. Great Britain, Granada Television. Brown, Michael F. 1993. Facing the state, facing the world: Amazonia's native leaders and the new politics of identity. L’Homme 33 (126–28): 307–26. Conklin, Beth A., and Laura R. Graham. 1995. The shifting middle ground: Amazonian Indians and eco-politics. American Anthropologist 97 (4): 695–710. Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Hertzberg, Hazel. 1971. The search for an American Indian identity: Modern panIndian movements. Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press. Jackson, Jean. 1989. Is there a way to talk about making culture without making enemies? Dialectical Anthropology 14 (2): 127–43. ———. 1994. Becoming Indian: The politics of Tukanoan ethnicity. In Amazonian Indians: From prehistory to the present, ed. A. Roosevelt, 383–406. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ortner, Sherry. 2003. New Jersey dreaming: Capital, culture, and the class of ’58. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 1982. Brazil's place in the Latin American indigenous movement. Survival International Review 7 (3–4): 19–21. Segal, Daniel. 1998. The hypervisible and the masked: Some thoughts on the mutual embeddedness of "race" and "class" in the United States now. In Democracy and ethnography: Constructing identities in multicultural liberal 258

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

lêda leitão martins

states, ed. C. J. Greenhouse with R. Kheshti, 50–60. Albany: State University of New York Press. Slater, David. 1998. Rethinking the spatialities of social movements: Questions of (b)orders, culture, and politics in global times. In Cultures of politics/politics of cultures: Re-visioning Latin American social movements, ed. S. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, and A. Escobar, 380–401. Boulder co: Westview. Starn, Orin. 1999. Nightwatch: The making of a movement in the Peruvian Andes. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Turner, Terence, and Vanessa Fajans-Turner. 2006. Political innovation and

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

inter-ethnic alliance. Anthropology Today 22 (5): 3–10.

259

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

part three

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

americanist refelections

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

10. “That’s Your Hopi Uncle” Ethical Borders in the Field

enrique salmón

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kincentrism and the native ethnographer For most ethnographers going into the field implies coming into contact with the exotic and that which is the “other.” Several personal, real, psychological, and symbolic borders are traversed. Once the borders, real and unreal, are addressed, the researcher moves into the dimension of becoming accustomed with the other. Often the other and the researcher become so familiar that a familial bond of sorts develops. Still, a border remains. On the other hand, the Native ethnographer working in the field in another culture perceives the various borders, but they are more ephemeral and, at the same time, culturally familiar as opposed to exotic. Native and non-Native ethnographers are often invited to cross the borders by those who are being studied, but for the Native ethnographer the studied becomes an addition to family and identity. I propose that these interactions can affect the nature of the data and knowledge collected by the Native and the non-Native ethnographers. Do ethical questions, for example, involving privileged knowledge differ for the non-Native and the Native ethnographer? The settings for raising such questions in this essay are my work on the Hopi reservation of Northern Arizona and among the Seri Indians, who occupy protected areas along the west coast of northern Mexico. I am a native Rarámuri of Chihuahua, Mexico, and conduct ethnographic studies among these groups. Many Hopi believe the Rarámuri to be

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

“that’s your hopi uncle”

living descendants of the Sun clan. Because they are another Mexican indigenous culture, the Seri make certain cultural as well as national connections. It is possible that the Hopi and the Seri assume that I, as a Native ethnographer, understand certain knowledge as they do and that the knowledge carries similar moral and spiritual weight for me. Fictitious kinships are developed and borders are erased as I meet my Hopi and Seri relatives. It would be redundant to define the concept of border here. For the purposes of this essay, however, borders are recognized as separating people, cultures, thought, and paradigms. They are often permeable and ephemeral. Borders, such as the one that separates the United States from Mexico, are political and historical. They are intentionally erected, sometimes as a result of specific need. Most borders instill a sense of the unknown and often a desire to peer over the border or into the other side. This is often the role of anthropologists. The Native anthropologist learns to straddle borders. Individuals and communities adapt to changes in their social and political systems as a way of absorbing external forces that threaten their already existing systems. Today individuals must select more than one ethnicity in response to ethnic and cultural allegiances or when a chosen career or economic status demands that the person assume another paradigm regarding work, economics, and society. Native researchers assume this paradigm shift once they begin their educational program in the public-school system. It continues at the university and during graduate work, when the researcher’s absorption of the Western paradigm into his own increases. Additional demands are made upon the individual to conform to the “system” in order to succeed. At this point the border has been straddled and maneuvered. What happens when the Native ethnographer conducts fieldwork among a Native culture not his own? Although all cultural borders are permeable, they become more transparent between indigenous peoples. When the indigenous people in question share cultural, linguistic, national, historical, and regional traits those boundaries disappear even more. The Hopi and the Rarámuri are linguistic cousins, both members 264

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

enrique salmón

of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family. As a result their languages share many cognates. The Hopi word for “bean,” mun, is very nearly identical to the Rarámuri word, muniki. Both cultures are matrilineal, although the Rarámuri do not maintain a clan system. However, many Hopi believe the Rarámuri are living descendants of the Hopi Sun clan. According to a Hopi historian, the Sun clan was the last clan to migrate north from Mexico. The Rarámuri are perceived as kin sharing Hopi relatives in northern Arizona. As a result, I often spend much time during visits to the Hopi villages being introduced to Hopi “relatives.” More than once people have pointed out someone and told me, “There goes your Hopi uncle.” Because I, as a Rarámuri, am believed to be of the Sun clan, in the Hopi way of clan membership and creating familial relations, I am “related” to many people in some of the villages. The relationships extend yet further: when my son was born, Hopi “relatives” insisted that the newborn be given a Hopi name through a naming ceremony. Although introductory social/cultural anthropology courses at colleges across the country excluded the study of kinship for many years, indigenous people have continued to place much emphasis on familial ties. Among the Hopi kinship is easy to ascertain due to the survival of their clan migration stories. When I encounter Seri consultants and friends, the conversation quickly moves toward mutual conclusions that the Seri and I are both Indians of Mexican origin, that we have suffered under both Spanish and Mexican colonization, and that we all are acquainted with certain relatively well-known Mexican Indian activists and elders. The Seri even attempt to uncover cognates between the Rarámuri and the Seri language even though they come from completely unrelated linguistic families. The most compelling events during my meetings with Seri consultants have been when the Seri find it very crucial that they be able to sing greeting songs to me and that I learn them. In an unusual event a Seri elder has asked me to learn part of his repertoire of songs. This elder made his request because he believed that Seri youth are less interested in learning the songs. The elder, therefore, fears that the songs will disappear. His request is an attempt to preserve the songs. The elder informed me that he would like to teach these songs 265

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

“that’s your hopi uncle”

to his own children, who in fact are learning them, but perceived me as a kind of Native relative who could also learn the songs to help protect them from disappearance. Both examples illustrate attempts to create fictitious kin. These kincentric connections are immediate. They generally occur during initial contact between an indigenous researcher and indigenous consultants. As a result access to the personal lives of the consultants and their knowledge is more active and immediate for the indigenous researcher. This point is important to my discussion here because kinship implies responsibilities toward one’s kin, as well as assumptions on the part of the Hopi and the Seri that I, as a Rarámuri ethnographer, will understand and manage knowledge in ways similar to their own customs. Assumptions are made that the knowledge carries equal moral and spiritual weight for me and for them. They assume that I understand their paradigm and worldview.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

native paradigms and ethics The paradigm in question is similar to the one set forth by Santa Clara educator and researcher Gregory Cajete. Cajete refers to the paradigm as Native science (Cajete 2000). The Native paradigm is a collected inheritance of Native peoples’ experiences with the natural world. It can also be approached as a map of reality drawn from the experiences of thousands of human generations that have given rise to a diversity of technologies for hunting, fishing, gathering, cultural expression, healing, and in this case maneuvering around people from other cultures. The Native paradigm includes basic questions such as what is the nature of our relationship to our landscapes and to each other? Relationships are central to the Native paradigm, and it is understood that they are in constant flux. Another essential element regarding human interaction is the responsibility to one’s family, clan, and community that precedes one’s own importance. With both the Hopi and the Seri I have been given access to what can be considered privileged knowledge, which one would not find in ethnographies and field reports. Privileged knowledge is often associated with ritual and ceremony. Sometimes the knowledge is personal, involving family matters. It can also be contextual, meaning that only under certain 266

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

enrique salmón

circumstances should the knowledge be shared. Unique responsibilities are expected and imposed when one is exposed to this kind of knowledge. They include knowing with whom one can and cannot share the knowledge and knowing how to use the knowledge and how one must be prepared to receive it. The indigenous people feel confident that the Native researcher will know how to handle and care for the privileged knowledge. The people from whom he has received the knowledge also believe that because he is an indigenous person he can be trusted with it. The situation often differs in the case of the non-Native researcher. Indigenous people continue to question whether the non-Native researcher can be trusted because in the past many secrets of Native ceremony and ritual were revealed in field reports and ethnographies. This phenomenon is less prevalent today, but the lack of trust remains. In light of the above one can ask: Do ethical questions involving privileged knowledge differ for the non-Native and the Native ethnographer? The non-Native ethnographer no doubt maintains personal values of what is right and wrong. These values are usually based on morals that can be traced to sources in Western European history and religious thought. Assuming that most anthropologists are non-Native, it can also be assumed that the worldview of most anthropologists draws from Western European history and religious thought and in the case of American anthropology, from United States history. No matter if one is religious, simply spiritual, agnostic, or even atheistic, the cultures of Western Europe and the United States have colored the paradigm and moral and ethical standards of most Europeans and Euro-Americans. Out of the history of Western Europe and the United States a liberalized culture and paradigm have evolved in which individual rights outweigh responsibility to community or to humanity in general. After the Reformation the religious establishment sanctioned personal responsibility. Church-related ethics had lost some potency, but their ideals remained the model for moral behavior and ethical precepts. Colored by the Judeo-Christian command in Genesis that man exercise dominion over nature and further affirmed by modern science and political thought, the modern Western ethos holds that everyone is endowed with 267

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

“that’s your hopi uncle”

inalienable rights and it is a virtue to reach one’s ultimate fulfillment. In the United States this notion of ultimate fulfillment has reached a zenith. In his observations of the early United States, Alexis de Tocqueville (2003) noted the term “individualism,” which was coined in early-nineteenth-century America. He also recognized that a loss of allegiance to community was a by-product of democracy. Although Western values are focused on the individual, they mandate that the researcher act in the best interest of his or her consultants when faced with ethical questions regarding knowledge. Much of the criteria for decision making in this process can be traced to the American Anthropological Association’s code of ethics, which stresses choices and moral obligations. The code notes that it is simply a framework and recognizes that the individual researcher is a member of other groups (e.g., families, religious groups, communities) from which criteria for ethical choices might emerge. Under the section about responsibility to scholarship and science, the code notes an inherent dilemma that every anthropological researcher faces. Here the code stresses that researchers bear an obligation to share the results of their fieldwork with the scientific and scholarly community as well as with the public. In the end the code implies that the majority of non-Native researchers will act in the best interest of their indigenous consultants. The Native ethnographer shares much the same decision-making process as that stated above, plus has an extra set of criteria that include ethics tied to the researcher’s indigenous identity. Within this identity is a sense of self attached to an understanding that it is one’s kincentric responsibility to protect the people and the people’s knowledge of which the ethnographer is now a part. In this instance the knowledge is more than data with potential intellectual property rights ramifications. The knowledge now carries spiritual and moral value, but the border always exists. moral landscapes and practical knowledge For many Native communities ethics are sets of culturally sanctioned rules that bring their worldview to the forefront, as it should be in relation to reality. When faced with a moral or ethical dilemma, individuals 268

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

enrique salmón

are often challenged, whereupon they must refer to their learned set of ethics and to their learned worldview. Doubt is actually helpful for the Native ethnographer, for it forces one to assume responsibility for one’s actions. In this case the ethical border meets the moral landscape. For indigenous people ethical rules and morals emerge from landscapes both real and cognitive. Among the Hopi the moral landscape is embedded in their past and in how they manipulate it to manage the present. As the Hopi migrated, settled for a short while, and then migrated again, a library of traditional ecological knowledge coevolved with their increasingly complex social system of clans and societies. The introduction of corn, which requires a minimum commitment of staying in one place for three months while it grows and matures, further stratified Hopi society. In other words they were forced to find a place to call home. Hopi social cohesion was achieved through obligation to a clan system that serves to maintain social order, ceremonial cycles, and still to a degree today, modes of production. The clans are part of the Hopi moral landscape. The landscape is a reflection of their shared kinship with one another and with their larger human and nonhuman community. Until the relatively recent human past, people living in small-scale agricultural communities drew most of their resources from their immediate landscape. For the Hopi the aridity of the Colorado Plateau ensures that life is always on the edge. Like indigenous communities around the world, the Hopi evolved a relationship with the landscape. They determined which crops would grow on their land and how to most efficiently ensure their survival. Over time and after years of observation, strategies were developed that guaranteed an annual harvest. These strategies are what might be called practical knowledge. Over time practical knowledge becomes sacred knowledge. The Hopi had not developed a writing system, so during this time the best way to maintain such knowledge was through story, songs, and rituals. In this way the Hopi collective memory remains alive as long as the Hopi Way perseveres. Because the knowledge and as a result Hopi culture are affected by the landscape, the land itself is perceived as the source of the knowledge. This library of knowledge 269

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

“that’s your hopi uncle”

doesn’t just remind people how to grow corn and beans in an arid climate. It also reminds them how to behave, what is right and wrong, and what it takes to preserve this way of life. The land has become a source of morals and values that are rekindled each time a story is retold or corn dancers fill a plaza in a Hopi village. Thus in order to preserve the community, the land must also be preserved.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

land management, identity, and responsibility I once invited a Hopi consultant and three other Native panelists to speak at an academic conference. The panelists described in detail the landmanagement practices of their tribal communities. Not only did they detail exact practices; they also described the social, cultural, and spiritual reasoning that guide their actions. During the question-and-answer period, a person asked the Hopi consultant why the Hopi didn’t simply dig wells and use irrigation to ensure their harvests. The consultant responded, “If the Hopi had irrigation, we would no longer need the kachinas.” The simplest description of kachinas is that they are rain spirits. To use means such as irrigation to ensure the survival of the crops at Hopi, where the people have relied on and trusted kachinas, would mean to deny everything that it means to be Hopi. Identity here is tied up with responsibility to one’s clan, to ceremony, to family, and to the land. This realization places the Hopi in context in their universe and with the land, which is seen as nurturing. On the Colorado Plateau the land cares for the people and protects them. Through story and ceremony, models of responsible behavior with the land and within the community are enacted. As a result to lose the land is to lose one’s flesh and one’s sense of what is right and wrong. being and doing The Native ethnographer perceives the border but is invited to cross it. Many Native ethnographers assume that in these cases the border must be straddled. One foot is placed in the indigenous world, while the other remains within the world of ethnography. But this method is difficult for the indigenous researcher when the studied community becomes an 270

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

enrique salmón

addition to family and identity. Because my son has been given a Hopi name, I, as well as my family, are forever connected to the Hopi ceremonial cycle, which includes certain spoken and unspoken responsibilities. In the Seri example, I can no longer visit without bringing my own song of greeting. But as this custom does not exist within my own Rarámuri heritage, a cultural crisis may emerge when I next meet my Seri consultants. Somehow the indigenous researcher must allow his identity to be placed in pluralistic dimensions that allow him to move freely while retaining his indigenous and ethnographic self. One method of maintaining this dual self is for the indigenous researcher to merge his duality into a single identity in which what he does is also who he is. Being becomes doing. The majority of non-Native social scientists encounter this consolidation when they read Native-authored ethnographies and other academic writings. The voices expressed in these writings often assume the attitude of a storyteller. This is reflective of many Native heritages in which learning and teaching are accomplished through story and experience (Dion-Buffalo and Mohawk 1999; Shorty 1999; Gallegos 1998). The voices are often those of political commentators and what might be called bridge makers. The political commentators feel obligated to express past and contemporary injustices that exist between anthropological research and Native communities (Thornton 1998; Cook-Lynn 1996; Rose 1992). The bridge maker attempts to straddle the divide that has separated anthropology and indigenous people (Molina and Evers 1990; Sekaquaptewa 2004; Ortiz 1969, 1994). All three examples serve a purpose and reflect the pluralistic dimensions of being a Native ethnographer. Ethical questions become connected to one’s cognitive moral landscape, and for American Indians many values emerge from family and community. To move along the border that separates the ethnographer from the indigenous person implies that the indigenous researcher must choose when he is either one or the other. The history of the indigenous researcher often focuses on the battle that he must fight. He is criticized 271

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

“that’s your hopi uncle”

both by the indigenous communities he is attempting to represent and by the ethnographic community in which he is attempting to become an equal. Both positions carry with them negative connotations. To occupy either space is to be negative in both. The best choice in this case may be to shun the dualistic burden and assume a space that creates a new and positive image in which the ethical borders disappear and the indigenous researcher’s identity becomes a part of his conclusions. references Cajete, Gregory. 2000. Native science: Natural laws of interdependence. Santa Fe: Clear Light. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 1996. Why I can’t read Wallace Stegner and other essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Dion-Buffalo, Yvonne, and John Mohawk. 1999. Daybreak farm and food project seeks revitalization of white corn usage. In A people’s ecology: Explorations in sustainable living, ed. Gregory Cajete, 175–86. Santa Fe: Clear Light. Gallegos, Joseph. 1998. Acequia tales: Stories from a Chicano centennial farm. In Chicano culture, ecology, politics: Subversive kin, ed. Devon Pena, 235–48. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Molina, Felipe, and Larry Evers. 1990. Coyote songs = wo’I bwikam: Songs from Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the Yaqui Bow Leaders’ Society. Tucson: Chax. Ortiz, Alfonso A. 1964. The Tewa world: Space, time, being and becoming in a pueblo society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. North American Indian anthropology: Essays on society and culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Rose, Wendy. 1992. The great pretenders: Further reflections on whiteshamanism. In The state of Native America: Genocide, colonization, and resistance, ed. Annette Jaimes, 403–22. Boston: South End. Sekaquaptewa, Emory. 2004. They go along singing: Reconstructing the Hopi past from ritual metaphors in song and image. American Antiquity 69 (3) (July): 457–86. Shorty, Lawrence. 1999. A Navajo’s meditations on food and culture. In A people’s ecology: Explorations in sustainable living, ed. Gregory Cajete, 129–50. Santa Fe: Clear Light. 272

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

enrique salmón

Thornton, Russell. 1998. The demography of colonialism and old and new Native Americans. In Studying native America: Problems and prospects, ed. Russell Thornton, 17–39. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2003. Democracy in America and two essays on America.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

London: Penguin Books.

273

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

11. The Dust Bowl Tango Looking at South America from the Southern Plains

peter m c cormick There’s a book up on the shelf about the dust bowl days And there’s a little bit of you and little bit of me In the photos on every page

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Nanci Griffith and Rick West, “Trouble in the Fields”

My formative years were spent on the southern plains, where, as children, my older brother and I understood ourselves as being far different from the earthly mix we actually are. The stories our grandparents told us about the Dust Bowl and about their lives during the time of environmental and economic upheaval in the Great American Desert told us who we were. These stories worked hand in hand with a childhood that was spent in dust. My grandparents would accompany us out into the vast open prairie with maps and history books in hand, cross-referencing written text with personal recollections as we reviewed the slow curvature of the land. The Arkansas River valley of far southwestern Kansas dissected our cultural map and was an avenue on which we were able to sew together our Dust Bowl past by placing historical markers, foundations of abandoned buildings and sod houses, and grave sites in larger context. We spent hours with our cousins in the deep arroyos and dry-washes and in the shallow red-earth canyons of Oklahoma, examining every crack in the clay. After spring rains we would jump in the car and ride over washboard dirt roads toward the sand hills, where the air was filled with the smell of

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

peter m c cormick

sagebrush. The dunes, berms, and blow-outs were decorated with huge yellow flowers atop prickly pear cactus. These things are as much a part of us as the stories have become; recollections of a not-so-distant past when our grandmother rode her horse from spring to windmill making sure there was water for the cattle herd; and when our great-grandparents marketed their last chickens in town as one of many last-ditch attempts to make it through the disaster. This is who we are. Yet this natural connection to place has been glossed over by an American version of ethnicity that denies such humane sensibilities. Southern plains culture before the Dust Bowl was extremely diverse in its own right, but we never celebrated its diversity, let alone our own, because our culture changed, as did that of many others during the 1930s. I have been obsessed with our geographic origins and with who we were and where we came from since a very young age. This was a natural avenue to an academic career in geography. It has taken nearly half a lifetime for me to conceptually grasp the who, where, and why of our past. Part of the difficulty lay in strong resistance within my family to deep inquiries into origins and stories beyond the Dust Bowl. I now know that our elders were withholding lots of emotional pain that made itself present in the form of unsavory secrets, secrets that became subjects themselves of deeper inquiry and which later revealed the truth. Most of my extended family knows and understands—and accepts at varying levels—the true nature of our identity, and our collective heritage: a motley mix of British, French, Iberian, Mediterranean, and American Indian extraction. The most prevalent comes from the mix that is Appalachia, a heritage that stems from the overlay of, first, the Spanish colonial upon the indigenous and, later, sequential waves of migrants from the British Isles and France. Not all these people were ethnically Spanish, English, or French: many were the descendants of displaced Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors who had fled Iberia to France and later ended up in the American colonies from various way stations (Hirschman 2005). In early colonial Appalachia there was intermarriage with mixedbloods from the Civilized Tribes and with members of displaced tribes in the Piedmont: people often identified by census agents as “free persons 275

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the dust bowl tango

of color.” As a collective they were sometimes called mustee, “Portuguese Indian,” or Melungeon.1 Several trajectories of settlement pushed out of Appalachia into the Ozarks, the Missouri Valley, and Indian Territory before our great-great-great grandparents landed in the middle of the continental United States. In the Dust Bowl there was intermarriage with Black Irish and English people; others were of Basque origin who had, for a short time, been Quakers. Many of them, I believe, had also been crypto Jews. Great uncles and cousins, and later a great-grandfather from this admixture, moved to New Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century, accounting for yet another entanglement, this time with an eclectic and complex historical landscape that, at times, appears incomprehensible. Our cultural background, as diverse as it was, had been through many transformations before the Dust Bowl. Geographic location and ecological conditions required new adaptations; sociopolitical climates transformed value systems and beliefs; and religious persecution led us to the near “ends of the earth.” Our hybrid heritage was not doomed to perish in the plains. Two branches of the family would move to distant places and become something entirely different; one group escaped the ruin left by the Civil War and moved from the upland South to the Mato Grosso of Brazil. The other, Rossalene McCormick, left wind-swept Wichita for Buenos Aires. Rossalene McCormick enrolled in Elementary Spanish at Wichita State University in the fall of 1930. Her family had been in the former Kansas cow town turned air industry capital for nearly fifteen years, moving from the fields just west of there, where her father’s family had lived for a generation. In the not-too-distant past, they had been across the Atlantic in places such as Ireland. They eventually landed near the KansasOklahoma border in hopes of claiming former tribal lands that had been opened up for settlement in the Cherokee Strip. Rossalene was the daughter of a prominent Wichita lawyer, unlike the majority of her father’s family, who rarely fled from their agrarian roots. This afforded her an education at Wichita State during what were clearly the toughest of times. To the west of Wichita, for a large expanse in an area encompassing Amarillo (Texas), Dodge City (Kansas), Guymon 276

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

peter m c cormick

(Oklahoma), and Pueblo (Colorado), the drought and wind storms laid siege to the plain. A long sequence of dry years during equally lean economic times placed a large chunk of American geography in jeopardy. Centered at the congruence of Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, the Dust Bowl was a direct result of misguided settlement and agricultural policies. The Homestead Act brought a flurry of settlement into this arid region in the 1870s and 1880s, and many of these settlers moved in the 1890s because drought returned in a normal twenty- or thirty-year cadence. Outside speculators demanded that this swath of the Great Plains be transformed into a bountiful garden, and they almost prevailed. When rain returned in the second decade of the twentieth century, the federal government promoted the tilling of even more soil and reopened closed homestead tracts for the growing of surplus grain; it also tried to turn patches of sand into a free-standing hardwood forest. These experiments were temporary at best, and by the early 1930s the rain stopped falling, again. The fields dried up, and nature took over (Worster 1979). During her junior year in college Rossalene met Juan Bautista DeNardo at a social gathering for Spanish students and Spanish speakers on the Wichita campus. Juan was an engineer for one of Wichita’s many aircraft manufacturers and had recently graduated from mit. They married within a year and bought an apartment in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires. Although Wichita and Buenos Aires are by no means similar cities, they do sit in similar geographic locales. The pampas of Argentina are very much like the southern plains, once covered by lush grasses. Both were home to nomadic aboriginal peoples before European colonization, and both regions were part of Spain’s New World empire, later transformed by British cattle-ranching interests. Although drought did not have a grip on Argentina in the 1930s, Rossalene walked into another formidable disaster. Argentina in the 1930s was under tremendous economic and political stress, brought on by large investments in the Argentine agricultural economy by British and other European financiers. The nation’s collective psyche was also suffering from defeat to neighbor 277

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the dust bowl tango

Uruguay in the World Cup. In the 1920s Argentine politics was largely focused on domestic agricultural issues and began to shift from the growing of grain on the fertile plain of the pampas to large-scale beef industry. Sizable migrations from very diverse places in Europe were changing the social scene, and a complex financial relationship with the United States and Britain placed Argentine society on hold. Political upheaval followed the onset of the Great Depression, and a near police state resulted from thirteen years of military influence in the government and the beginning of World War II (Calvert 1989). Two years ago, in August, I was walking along the cobblestone street of Calle Defensa in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires. The wind was funneling garbage down the street; the smell of charred Argentine beef, parrilla, followed plastic wrappers as if the two were dancing to the tango music emanating from the second-story dance halls and watering holes on the district’s square, Plaza Dorrego. Taxi cabs were shuttling residents home from work, to have a drink before dinner, or to another part of this massive metropolis, which was apparently recovering from its last bout with globalization. At night 1950s-era box streetlights swing from wires that hold together nineteenth-century multistory buildings, many crumbling from multiple economic crashes, the most recently in 2001. The cornices and keystones were holding tightly to the granite and mortar. It would appear to the casual observer that many of these Parisian buildings are just short, by North American standards, of being condemned. In many ways, though, these buildings are monuments to a sometimes illustrious, often turbulent, past, and of more recent cultural renewal and economic success. Seventy years ago my family had lost parts of its heritage, part of the Black Irish, indigenous, Melungeon one that was in part swallowed up by assimilationist policies and the racist social climate of the eastern seaboard, later to be eaten alive by the sheer vastness and the dust storms of the plains. They had also lost Rossalene, who had left the southern plains for the Argentina pampas. Rossalene didn’t come directly from that motley mix that married into the McCormick line, yet her Ulster-Scots and Irish lineage was usurped by the Latin of Argentina and the hybrid Spanish and Italian culture of 278

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

peter m c cormick

Buenos Aires, which invaded even the most intimate of cultural spaces where something from the plains may have survived: the home. It was difficult to protect the most interpersonal from the political instability and violence outside apartment walls. Living for generations with the possibility of economic collapse and the threats of regime change and military juntas will change people. This has happened in Argentina many times. During the 1970s and 1980s thousands of people went missing during the “dirty war”: political prisoners and ghosts of an Americansupported regime.2 The turn of the twenty-first century was equally shocking and brutal. The Argentine peso, once equated one to one with the American dollar, on one winter evening crashed. It plummeted to thirty cents on the dollar. Multinational corporations began pulling out of Argentina. Under President Menem, the Argentine economy, save the last estancias and mom-and-pop stores, had been put up for sale. The infrastructure of some cities, including water systems and natural-gas pipelines, had been purchased by foreign investors.3 This situation was not entirely new. Not unlike the rest of Latin America, Argentina has quite often been tripped up, run over, and needlessly strapped by economic problems caused by massive international debt. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (imf), along with wealthy developed nations, have offered very generous financial assistance that always comes with tremendous economic, political, and cultural costs. For example, on the eve of the 2001 crash, Argentina had accumulated 180 billion dollars of debt owed to the First World. More recently it paid off nearly 10 billion to the imf, but then, reluctantly, took on 8 billion more from the World Bank in order to renovate its infrastructure left in shambles after 2001. No comprehensive theoretical framework exists beyond a very broadly defined colonialism to explain this condition. The social and economic history of Latin America is one of boom and bust, of indebtedness and near collapse. But on the eve of the twentieth century, Argentine president Carlos Pelligrini described exactly why it is curious that Argentina, of all places, has had such turbulent economic times: 279

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the dust bowl tango

This republic possesses all the requisite conditions to become, with the passage of time, one of the great nations of the earth. Its territory is immense and fertile, its surface being equal to that of all Europe save Russia; it is capable of supporting at least 100 million human beings; almost every climate is to be found within its limits, and consequently it can yield all products, from those of the tropics to those of the polar regions. Its rivers and its mountains are among the greatest of the globe. As its maritime frontier it has the Atlantic, which brings it into contact with the

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

whole world. (Poneman 1987)

Argentina’s social and political problems are not confined to its internal preoccupations and consciousness, and it is exactly this tie to the Atlantic early on, and the rest of the planet now, that has led to the current state of affairs. A culture of economic and social unrest has been part of Argentina since it was a young republic, but one cannot forget the role globalization has played within the cusp of Latin American existence. Argentina owes much of its struggles to colonial Spain and subsequent interventions by Great Britain, the Monroe Doctrine, and more contemporary manifestations of the global economic agenda. The collapse of 2001 led to days of riots and protests, which made interesting bedfellows with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Argentines were forced out of a deep slumber of nearly forty years of political instability and corruption. During the 1990s most of Argentina was unaware of the usurping of its infrastructure and financial assets by global interests; the nation’s collective memory also attempted to deny the realities of the past.4 The disaster of 2001 brought both to the surface, creating a yetto-be understood consciousness: the “Argentinazo.”5 This state of mind is more than rhetorical: it has materialized within the economic landscape, as thousands of Argentine workers have, since the collapse, taken over abandoned factories and hotels, literally renovating the management and production structures inside out.6 A country once proud of its remarkable success in creating—on the surface—an imaginary middle class with a high standard of living began to resemble a hybrid cooperative. The local recovery of parts of the economic infrastructure has been mirrored by efforts to maintain local control of water rights and natural gas in Bolivia 280

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

peter m c cormick

and the seizure of manufacturing plants and the oil and gas industry by Venezuelan authorities. These events are indicative of the strong antiYankee sentiment in the southern portion of the Americas.7 When I walk through the streets of central Buenos Aires or fly down its wide boulevards in taxis that rarely adhere to marked traffic lanes or obey traffic lights, I am transfixed by the level of landscape transformation that is occurring. You see it in the place, and you see it in the people. I have not witnessed anything like this since my early days on the plains, when large machinery effectively leveled most of our ranching land for crops. I will never see that happen again, but that magnitude of change and what it did to folks back home is perhaps why I return to Buenos Aires again and again believing that one day I will figure it out. I try to envelop myself in this place because there is a story there that, for me, has only started to unfold. There is something about the wind that whips down the old colonial streets of the barrios of San Telmo and Monserrat, something about the smell of parrilla, and something about the plastic bags. The spirit of the riots and demonstrations of 2002 following the collapse still drift under the street lamps and lurk around street corners. The ubiquitous antiglobal, anti-American graffiti on almost every granite edifice and metal fence reminds me that the “Argentinazo” has yet to be witnessed in full. Maybe I am obsessed with Argentina because, not unlike the High Plains, it is brutally honest. The western swath of the High Plains has seen an equally turbulent transformation, largely brought on by the development of the natural gas and oil industries in the 1950s; much of the Dust Bowl sits on what was once one of the world’s largest natural-gas fields. The infamous land of the Joads and John Steinbeck was transformed into a resource juggernaut (and a seemingly endless pool of tax resources for people in places such as Topeka and Oklahoma City), and tremendous investment from external companies that are now multinational brought short-lived wealth. In the 1970s another ecological transformation occurred, and developments in irrigation technology allowed the most desertlike portions of the region—the sand hills—to be leveled for crops used to fuel the 281

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the dust bowl tango

growing beef-production industry. By the 1980s an area nearly abandoned in the 1890s and the 1930s experienced tremendous growth with the establishment of beef and pork processing plants. Coal-fired power plants began to dot the landscape, and migrants began streaming into the region from Mexico and Central America. Latin America arrived in southwest Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle, an ethnic admixture that was supplemented by workers from as far away as Southeast Asia. While High Plains folks have always been suspicious of, if not downright hostile toward, metropolitan North Americans, the anxiety brought on by the global economy has caused a significant amount of social stress (de Wit 1997). Places such as Garden City, Kansas, and Guymon, Oklahoma, became the most diverse communities in their respective states; Mexican, Guatemalan, and Honduran markets and restaurants stood aside the old mom-and-pop cafés and Vietnamese takeaways for several years. Things are starting to change, again (Stull 1990; McCormick 1999). Although tremendous strides have been made in the southern plains in recognizing its new cultural diversity, very few people seem to have come to terms with the reality that the natural-gas field is almost gone, and the water in the aquifers that supply the fields, which, in turn, fuel the agro-industrial machine, is going to be gone very soon. The extractive nature of the economy here—which fuels the economies of places far distant more than it does its own—is nearing a close. Local politicians and landholders have constantly jockeyed for local control of resources, but these attempts have been rhetorical at best. Belatedly, many of us from the plains are seeing what the kind of destruction fueled by trends in grain markets, cattle futures, and energy speculation does to a region’s geographical disposition. There is a very sober subtext to the transformation of this region, and much has been said about the peril of the High Plains and the looming, inevitable dust bowl of the future. What this brings as far as culture change and readaptation will likely be only a small chapter of a much larger body of work on our species’ adaptation to global climate change. The chapter’s title will likely be biblical in proportion, “From Dust to Dust” (Popper and Popper 1987). What does all of this mean? The most fundamental answer is this: the 282

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

peter m c cormick

more recent events in Argentina and the southern plains have connections to our daily lives. Broadly speaking, however, they help us understand something entirely different. The taciturn result of globalization is the continued hybridization of cultures on the global scene, in those places where different people from different places intersect—in hyper global contexts such as the world of information and e-culture, but also in global cities.8 Even while we propose to fortify our borders to the south, the world is becoming borderless. The conceptual geography of the world has shrunk as alarmingly over the past two decades as my family’s geography has expanded deep into the southern cone. This new political geography will create new cultures that will be reconstituted in places, in particular locations. This hybridization and reconstitution are a process our species has been constantly involved in—or dare I say, evolved in. We see that it scares people because they retreat into very safe colonial corners— into essentialized, racialized concepts of the world where they can easily define “self” and even more easily define “other.” This is the most dangerous characteristic of our time, because it continues the colonial agenda of ethnic and racial strife even when very few of us are just one of those constructed things anymore. The mapping of the human genome and dna confirms tremendous biological and genetic entanglement, and the new map of the emerging cultural landscape is going to show us that we are creating new identities and ethnicities under the scope of the global. These identities are coming from place. We can only hope that this new sensitivity to the local will give us a greater understanding of ourselves within communities and also of the land that lies beneath us. It must. If we fail in this, we will continue to spiral into the downspout of empire.9 Buenos Aires and the Dust Bowl, therefore, give us a remarkable glimpse of what happens when the sky actually falls—an event that has happened in both places several times. People will reinhabit their places and recognize themselves as part of a larger historical and political geography that has both roots and significant reach (see Lippard 1997). At the personal level Rossalene’s children long for the plains just as I long for Buenos Aires. Perhaps they have imagined something about their southern plains roots that is grounded in what really happened; 283

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the dust bowl tango

likewise, I am as obsessed with my family’s past as I am with Argentina. Both have more recently completely rearranged what my brothers and sister and I think of ourselves. The secrets that our family members kept suddenly revealed a very large world, and it is one that is not only tightly knitted together by communications and economics but is also hewn tightly together by people. We are what Salman Rushdie might call “global cosmopolitan,” all of us trying to make sense of ourselves, of our complex intertwined histories, in a postmodern culture of disconnection and disassociation (Said 1994; Shackleton 2004). A couple of weeks before I began preparing the lecture from which this essay originated, one of my anthropology colleagues had seen the public announcement for my talk and proceeded to ask me what in the world Oklahoma and Kansas had to do with Argentina. “Cattle, natural gas, and wheat” was my initial response. Of course, I then uttered, “Global economics ties them together along with economic and geographic similarity.” I then began going through some of the remarkable likenesses: There are limited similarities in the bronc-busting rancher and the Argentine gaucho. There’s Carlos Gardel and Woodie Guthrie. There’s a keen suspicion in both places of the metropolitan core and contempt for the perceived centers of control of the global political economy. The list could go on, but it is safe to say that I wouldn’t have been looking for these parallels had I not uncovered the story of Rossalene. If my time in Argentina has taught me one thing, it is this: one of the lessons of globalization, regardless of how long- or short-lived the world empire may be, is that place matters. Or in the words of aboriginal leader Rob Riley, we are going to have to respect Argentine nationhood, sovereignty, and their territorial identity (and those of all our earthly neighbors) before we will ever have any understanding of our own (Pilger 2002, 207). The realities of place have the ability to mediate the tension and anxiety of the global, the transnational, and the unknown (Shackleton 2004). This leads me directly to my quest to understand myself and my relationship with my extended family’s story and how this is intimately tied to my work in cultural studies and geography. There has been a great deal of grappling in human geography over the 284

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

peter m c cormick

past twenty years or so over matters of disciplinary integrity and territoriality. Much of this, I suppose, is directly related to the language of postmodernism and postcolonialism and the influence of technologies such as remote sensing and geographic information systems. All of this occurred as disciplinary boundaries began to blur and mirror an American landscape that has only recently seen the manifestation of political units and imagined worlds that limit our scope and our understanding of all of us as inhabitants of the Americas. Since the formative years of American cultural anthropology and cultural geography in Berkeley with the likes of Carl Sauer and Alfred Kroeber, these two disciplines have shared quite a lot: from geographic area specialization to epistemologies and theoretical stances, to, albeit lost in many ways, a humanism that is interested in the character of places and of human groups and how together they affect the individual. In the future our colleagues, whether we like it or not, will dabble more and more in other disciplines’ matters, and we will also see more-sincere attempts at spanning ethnic, cultural, and national divides. We might actually embody our own post–modern/Fordist/colonial/neoMarxist epistemologies and aim toward praxis or begin to dissolve some of the falsehoods of our colonial past (I think here about ethnicity and identity by color or race). The logical point of departure is familiar ground: the individual, the local, and the specific. This brings me back to the heart of cultural geography and Carl Sauer (1963), who constantly criticized American society for “freeing people from the land.” Globalization, like much our more recent theoretical jockeying, appears to want to “free us from ourselves.” At our academic core we are all interested in the intersection of humans and nature and of cultures and landscapes. After all, without these things, what do we actually have? A few years ago one of my mentors, James Shortridge, suggested to the attendees of an annual meeting of southwestern geographers that we might reconsider the idea that cultures are environmentally determined (Shortridge 1996). Belatedly, I think I understand what he meant. My point of reference is the Dust Bowl, which grounds me in many ways, and from there I know that I can make parallels between what appear on the surface to be disparate places, like the 285

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the dust bowl tango

pampas, and come back again. Geographers, anthropologists, and countless others will be brought to these new, uncharted spaces through people like Rossalene. notes This essay and the larger body of work from which it comes are dedicated to my grandparents, who took their Indian, Melungeon, and Sephardic heritages with them when they returned to the Dust. I am indebted to my cousins Elizabeth Hirschman and Donald Panther-Yates for leading me down the right path. Many thanks to Kathy for the invitation. Thanks also to the Fort Lewis College Faculty Development Fund for supporting parts of this research. Muchas gracias, amigos, Santo, Javier, Nestor, Hector, Charles, y Gertrude. Un abrazo para mi primo, Juan DeNardo McCormick. Otra vez. 1. The Melungeon population of Appalachia has been the subject of a tremendous amount of interest and controversy lately. A consensus appears to be building that this population, once thought to be small, is rather large and is a result of the mixing of Iberian and Middle Eastern settlers who had been part of Spanish and English trading parties with the indigenous population of the American Southeast. Later migrations into the Piedmont and upper South by refugees of the Inquisition (Sephardic Jews and Moors) in Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supplemented this population (see Hirschman 2005; Kennedy and Kennedy 1997). Our families were of this mixture: Sephardic names include Cuba, Pillo, Monnis, Callahin, Jorgas, Nassi, Khanadi, Rosa, David, Baez, Santos, and Gascon. The families that were at one point crypto Jews include Kieffer, Mayabb, Dula D’Aultun, Baigne, and Ball. Our Melungeon families are Sizemore, Yates Brashears, Collins, Lucas, Noel, Bass, Kennedy, Davis, Nash, Mullisn, Center, and Carrico. The family names on the Miller-Guion and Dawes rolls include Tunnell, Mabe, Waller, Yates, and Doolin. 2. For a complete account of the attempts to expose the atrocities of the “dirty war” by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, see Brouvard 1984. 3. For a synopsis of the crisis in Argentina from 2001 to 2002, see Burbach 2004. 4. Naomi Klein, “Out of the Ordinary,” Guardian Unlimited, January 25, 2003, 286

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

peter m c cormick

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/argentina.weekend7 (accessed January 2, 2009) 5. Klein captures this succinctly: “How do you celebrate . . . something that is impossible to define” (“Out of the Ordinary”). 6. The Canadian film documentary The Take (Lewis 2005) does a much better job of illustrating the power of this process than I. 7. Gregory Wilpert, “Venezuelan Authorities Seize Idle Heinz Ketchup Plant,” Venezuelanalysis, September 9, 2005, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/ news/1352 (accessed January 2, 2009). 8. The idea of cultural hybridity is best entertained by Bhabha (1994). The notions of hybridity are based on cultural difference. Cultures understood as seemingly diametrically opposed within the colonial construct/context (or completely independent of one another with impenetrable boundaries) intersect and mix in multiple arenas. In this case the culture of late capitalism and globalization (neocolonialism) impacts the lived experiences and realities of local cultures, including those based on neonationalism and those native to a place, or indigenous. The result is hybridized cultures that are products of global economic agendas manifest in multiple arenas of development (Mehta 1994; Minh-Ha 1991; Bhabha 1994). 9. Here I borrow the words, but not the implied meanings, of Hutcheon

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

1989.

references Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Brouvard, Marguerite. 1984. Revolutionizing motherhood: The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington de: sr Press. Burbach, Roger. 2004. Argentina squares off with international financiers. Zmag. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6906 (accessed February 13, 2006). Calvert, Susan. 1989. Argentina: Political culture and instability. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. de Wit, Cary. 1997. Sense of place on the Kansas high plains. PhD diss., University of Kansas, Lawrence. Griffith, Nanci, and Rick West. 1987. Trouble in the fields. Lone star state of mind. mca Records. 287

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the dust bowl tango

Hirschman, Elizabeth Caldwell. 2005. Melungeons: The last lost tribe in America. Macon ga: Mercer University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. Circling the downspout of empire: Post-colonialism and postmodernism. Ariel 20 (4): 149–75. Kennedy, N. Brent, and Robyn Vaughan Kennedy. 1997. The Melungeons: The resurrection of a proud people. Macon ga: Mercer University Press. Lewis, Avi, dir. 2005. The Take. Ottawa: First Run Features/National Film Board of Canada. Lippard, Lucy. 1997. The lure of the local: Senses of place in a multicentered society. New York: New Press. McCormick, Peter. 1999. Traces in the sand: Culture and development in the hills of southwest Kansas. North American Geographer 1 (1): 23–52. Mehta, Gita. 1994. Karma kola: Marketing the mystic East. London: Vintage. Minh-Ha, Trinh. 1991. When the moon waxes red: Representation, gender, and cultural politics. London: Routledge. Pilger, Richard. 2002. The new rulers of the world. London: Verso. Poneman, Daniel. 1987. Argentina: Democracy on trial. New York: Paragon House. Popper, Frank, and Deborah Popper. 1987. The Great Plains: From dust to dust. Planning 53:12–18. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage. Sauer, Carl. 1963. Homestead and community on the middle border. In Land and life: A selection of the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, ed. J. Leighly, 32–42. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shackleton, Mark. 2004. More sour than sweet? Food as a cultural marker in Timothy Mo’s Sour sweet, Zadie Smith’s White teeth, and Salman Rushdie’s The ground beneath our feet. Helsinki English Studies 3. http://www.eng.helsinki .fi/hes/Literature/more_sour1.htm. Shortridge, James. 1996. Keeping tabs on Kansas. Journal of Cultural Geography 16 (1): 5–16. Stull, Donald. 1990. “I come to the garden”: Changing ethnic relations in Garden City, Kansas. Urban Anthropology 19 (4): 303–20. Worster, Donald. 1979. Dust bowl. New York: Oxford.

288

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

12. The Lizard’s Dream

steven l. rubenstein and kathleen s. fine-dare The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

As Enrique Salmón and Peter McCormick demonstrate in the two preceding chapters of this volume, border crossings are not only scholarly, intellectual, and geographical, but visceral, emotional, and otherwise very personal. As scholars of and about complex ancestry who hold “nonmainstream” ideas about the relationship of personal experience to knowledge production, each author has led us to the point where we can close this volume by reflecting on the role of reflexivity in the production of Americanist work in the twenty-first century. In so doing we provide a piece of experimental writing that re-creates through its structure the bordercrossing nature of our relationship as coeditors and the interactions that went into the creation of this volume. The project—which has turned out to be more complex and difficult than either of us imagined—began in 2003 when Kathy organized an American Anthropological Association (aaa) annual meeting session and asked Steven for advice about which colleagues might be willing to present insights they had gained as “Americanists” who had worked on both sides of the Rio Grande or with Americans who had lived their lives traveling across that increasingly dangerous border. As we got to know each other in the course of organizing the session

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

and later developing a book proposal, we realized that although we had only barely met in person in 2002, we had nevertheless shared important intellectual, academic, and field experiences that spanned common times and places. We had experienced graduate training in anthropology during a period of serious “postmodern” questioning of the authority status of the field; we had conducted research in Ecuador during a time of greatly heightened indigenous activism; and we had experienced similar difficulties translating diverse and complex field and post-fieldwork personal experiences into satisfying anthropological discourse. These experiences, however situational, are significant not because of what they reveal about us as individuals but for what they have to say about the construction of anthropological knowledge within the multiple and intersecting sites of fieldwork, teaching, publishing, and professional gatherings. Kathy has taught at a small liberal-arts college since 1983. Steven was on the faculty of a larger midwestern university from 1997 until 2005, when he moved to a yet larger institution in the United Kingdom. For both of us our primary, although not exclusive, target audience has consisted of undergraduate students attending nonelite state institutions. Consequently, we conceive of our border crossings to include experiences working with our own students, who themselves traverse boundaries ranging from Indian reservations to largely white suburbs. Again, with our student readers in mind, we decided to write a joint chapter that would give a better sense of the small steps, decisions, and distractions that culminate in becoming a scholar, particularly when those steps entail multiple crossings of regional and intellectual borders in what has been termed “multi-sited research” (Marcus 1995). Although academics invariably grapple with these questions as they write, the books and articles they produce typically erase or even deny any such struggle. The biographical information so important to histories of anthropological thought and sociologies of knowledge is often seen as unnecessary and self-indulgent when produced in the form of what is often labeled “navel-gazing” autobiography. As Robert Murphy once observed, no one is interested in reading about anthropologists—it is the people anthropologists work with who are interesting. 290

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Although we agree that excessive fixation on the author is usually to the detriment of the real subject of the written piece, we agree with the feminist scholar Elspeth Probyn that it is not reflexivity per se that creates bad scholarship but how it is done (1993, 80). As Don Kulick notes, while “banal egoism” should always be avoided, a reflexive approach to ethnographic work is “capable of using the self in an epistemologically productive way” (1995, 20). Just as we make “pre-theoretical commitments” to participant observation and other direct and intimate methods of ethnographic practice (Moore 2004), we must also do so in terms of the dialectical construction of methodological decisions as we have moved from one site to another. While this imagery may be a bit confusing, especially to those who have not entered the baroque world of college professorship, we hope that the concrete examples we provide of our career histories will clarify the process. After conversing back and forth (between Ecuador, Ohio, England, and Colorado) regarding how best to accomplish our goal, we finally agreed to speak in our own first-person voices for most of the rest of the chapter. Kathy’s account is indicated by “KF” and Steven’s by “SR.” This format is just a faint echo of the many conversations that produced this heterogeneous text. We hope that through this account we may illustrate Dorinne Kondo’s vision of how the self ultimately “enacts and embodies theory” (Kondo 1990, 24, emphasis in original; cited in Kulick 1995, 20). kf: from graduate school to “the field” and back I began graduate school in 1976 at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, at a time when the political consciousness of many of my fellow students and faculty members had been heightened by the war in Vietnam and by waves of independence movements in areas such as the Pacific and Africa, where anthropological research had cut its teeth. Critiques within American and British social scientific circles regarding the colonialist histories of the discipline created for many would-be anthropologists a sense of embarrassment and regret for pursuing an area of study that once seemed fashionable and even bohemian.1 The growing emphasis on international justice (for instance, President Jimmy Carter’s insistence on more-conscientious United States policies regarding human 291

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

rights) produced awareness that “the anthropological was the political.” In other words, anthropology could not be a “value-free,” “neutral” set of practices modeled on the methods of the natural sciences. Rather, it had to be aware of the political conditions under which the subjects of our studies lived on a daily basis (see Scholte 1974). Asked bluntly by more than one faculty member upon entering the university whether I planned to “be” a Latin Americanist or a Southeast Asianist (two major areas of strength among the Illinois faculty), I opted for the Americas for reasons as simple as I spoke a little Spanish and my office mates, Joanne Rappaport and Clark Erickson, had already conducted research in South America.2 My recollection of most of the Americanist professors is that they were theoretical eclectics (meaning few of them were strongly wedded to any particular “school” of thought) strongly informed by ethnohistory, political economy, symbolic analysis, cultural ecology, and systems thinking. Methodological virtuosity in languages and archival research was emphasized more strongly than theoretical commitment. Joseph Casagrande was one of the first Americanist “border crossers” under whom I studied, as he had shifted to a long career in highland Ecuador after conducting research with Chippewa and Comanche peoples of North America.3 In addition to Casagrande, who encouraged me to keep the bigger Americanist and anthropological pictures in mind as I began to concentrate on the northern Andes, I received important influences from Frank Salomon, who brought his Cornell University education to us through the lens of John Murra’s Andeanist political ecology; from my first advisor, Douglas Butterworth, who had studied with Oscar Lewis and conducted research in Mexico, Cuba, and the Texan colonias populated with Mexican migrants; and the sociologist Stephen G. Bunker, who had worked in Guatemala, Uganda, and Brazil. Each of these scholars deepened in distinct ways my understandings of the relationships of social power, colonialism, migration, and the destruction and/or maintenance of the natural environment within frameworks that were ethnographic, interpretive, historical, and imbued with a strong commitment to protect the human rights of their ethnographic collaborators.4 292

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

My academic advisor, Norman E. Whitten Jr., was particularly influential during my graduate training. Whitten discussed ways that marginalized peoples can change and yet still retain their distinct cultural identities as they adapt and apply powerful tools of rich metaphoric imagery, dream analysis, and linguistic difference to projects of political resistance (e.g., Whitten 1976, 1981). Whether talking about persons of indigenous, African, or mixed descent living in the Amazon, the Andes, or on the coast of Ecuador, Whitten emphasized the high stakes in “getting it right” when examining the real problems at hand. Whitten’s own deep immersion in Afro-Ecuadorian and tropical-forest cultural contexts impressed me, as did his willingness to draw from a diverse array of approaches—for example, British neofunctionalism; cultural ecology and American neoevolutionism; Latin American Marxism; and American, French, and British symbolic analysis—to understand the workings of meaning, power, violence, and cultural assertion within particular, and powerful, ecological contexts in South America. This “sociocultural eclecticism” and close attention to text, context, language, history, and lived experience formed the basis of my doctoral research proposal to study interactions among African American and Native American migrants in Quito. I arrived in Ecuador in late 1980 with funding from the Fulbright and the National Science foundations. When I went to the Ecuadorian authorities to obtain permission to conduct research, my project was greeted with surprise that I had chosen a field site where “nothing happens anymore” of anthropological interest. This attitude was largely due to the fact that in Ecuador anthropology, long defined as properly focused on Natives, was deeply tied to the state project of creating an Ecuadorian national identity (see Prieto 2004). In the late 1970s many Ecuadorians believed that “pure Indians” had vanished, precisely because of the kinds of factors that had been introduced by Afro-Ecuadorian migrants into my urbanizing field site. In other words, they conceived of real Indians as rural, monolingual, and usually poverty stricken, except for a couple of notable examples. The population shift to the cities, the primacy of Spanish, and the heavy participation in wage labor seemed to signal a “world on the wane,” particularly for urban indigenes. 293

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

The authorities governing research allowed me to work in Quito, but my own longings to “discover the hidden Indian” led me to dramatically shift my research from a focus on interactions between Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous migrants to one that concentrated primarily on local expressions of Andean indigenous culture in simultaneously resisting state power and becoming officially incorporated into the Quito metropolitan area. In 1980 the young leftist lawyer Jaime Roldós replaced a long string of autocratic generals as president of the republic and gave his inaugural address in both Spanish and Quichua. The women’s movement was picking up steam, and indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian peoples were organizing political parties and social action groups all over the country. Things in the early 1980s were not so rosy where I worked in Cotocollao (northwest Quito). Less than two decades after the passage of a major agrarian reform law, the “liberated” indigenous peons formerly tied to haciendas had already become “poor urbanites” because most of the lands awarded to them by the reform had been swiftly bought up for a song by urban speculators. Nonetheless, at the same time that these residents were reclassifying themselves from indigenous near-slaves into Ecuadorian citizens, the state was building a democratic movement on a reified and often romanticized view of the “Indian.”5 Therefore, despite my original rejection of the Ecuadorian cultural authorities’ privileging of authentic Indians as the only legitimate focus of anthropological study, I bought into it, trying to unpeel layers covering key ritual performances to unlock lo andino (the “essentially Andean”) from its prison beneath the new concrete condominiums and diesel fumes. I was explicitly influenced by Frank Salomon’s (1981) analysis of the ways that urban Natives (“Quito Runa”) enacted key aspects of their Andean-Catholic beliefs in the yumbada dance that took place near the PanAmerican highway in northern Quito during the Catholic observance of Corpus Christi. Although the yumbada can still be viewed as a tantalizing window into “the Amazonian/Andean Other” (see Fine-Dare 2007), the remainder of life in that part of the Andes revealed little more than a great deal of exploitation, poverty, and daily struggle that could not be alleviated 294

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

by looking more “deeply” at either the promise of Christian redemption or the promise of anthropological “discovery” of Andean survivals.6 A turning point in my consciousness was the realization that any interest the residents of this area exhibited in the past was primarily applied to the desire to live better in the present. As I moved through the neighborhood and its various smaller communities, everyone described himself or herself as overworked or underemployed or exploited, even the middle-class residents who pinpointed the agrarian reform of 1964 as the beginning of a steep decline in their standard of living. I saw no real functioning subsystems, just webs of connections so obvious that one could only conceive of them as being “on the surface.” As these webs became more densely twisted, they served at every turn to undermine my questions and tentative answers regarding the complexities of identity and the strategies of resistance. I came to realize that this experience was not just because “that’s how cities are” or “that’s what it’s like to work in cities,” but because that’s how all social reality is, albeit perhaps more easily masked in rural or “less-complex” contexts where everyone knows one another and works simultaneously to create an agreed-upon vision of things. As Steven Rubenstein notes below, just because something sits on the surface does not mean it is superficial, either for those who live it or the researchers who come to understand its grinding power. Despite this immersion in South American research, I rarely considered myself an “Americanist” scholar, largely because my work was conducted in an urban borderland where it was never clear just who I was studying: Runa, blacks, cholos, or mestizos. Because Americanist anthropology had traditionally focused primarily on indigenous cultures, those who focused on whites and mestizos were considered Latin Americanists, while those who focused on blacks were considered African American specialists. The identity of the people I studied was therefore significant to my own. It was a question of “who I was going to be” at professional gatherings and, most importantly, in the job market. Would I be more employable if I concentrated on Native aspects of urban existence? Should I avoid delving too deeply into gender so as to avoid being pigeonholed into what seemed to be a new ghetto for female graduate students (especially 295

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

at an institution where, in those days, female faculty members were rarer than hens’ teeth)? These questions were to become more troublesome as I tried to find ways to position myself within accurate accounts of identity and powerlessness in relationship to my research population’s struggles with local and state forms of power and authority.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

sr: from college to graduate school Around the same time that Kathy began her field research, I entered Columbia University in New York City. Whereas Kathy’s graduate school experience forced her to come to terms with eclecticism, my college experience forced me to confront a dualism. At least from the perspective of a neophyte, anthropologists at Columbia seemed divided between “materialists” (led by Marvin Harris, who had recently left for the University of Florida), who believed that people’s beliefs and values reflected the material conditions of their lives, versus, well, everyone else, as materialists seemed to lump structuralists, symbolic anthropologists, and interpretive anthropologists together into some vaguely “idealist” camp that claimed that people’s beliefs and values determined how they lived.7 I was initially drawn to anthropology as a way of uniting a love of intellectual activity with a desire to go out into the world and experience life in its most vital, and often crudest, forms. Perhaps for this reason I was first drawn to materialism, which I interpreted not so much as a specific epistemological stance but rather as a “down-to-earth” style combined with moderately left-wing political commitments. Ultimately, however, I committed myself to anthropology because it seemed to be a discipline that values diversity and embraces various hybrids. By my senior year I had therefore come to question not only cultural materialism but the very opposition it assumed and reinforced. Having spent my junior year abroad in Israel, I decided that questions of power and justice could not be reduced to any specific set of determinate causes. My move away from determinism began under the supervision of Morton Fried (seemingly ironic, as Fried was best known for his interest in cultural evolution and was thus often lumped into the “materialist” camp). Although a specialist on China, Fried agreed to work with me on a senior 296

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

honor’s thesis concerning the English civil war. Every time we met, our discussions ranged wider and wider, reaching back to Roman history and across a spectrum of theories of the state. Fried’s example and tutelage cemented in me a mind open to as many facets of human life and history as I could take in and an appreciation for the hidden connections between seemingly dissimilar phenomena. As is evident in his book The Notion of Tribe (1975), Fried was a committed empiricist who understood that words are better thought of as heuristic devices that we should try to apply precisely but never mistake for real things. This seemed to me to be a way of taking both material conditions and mental constructs equally seriously. Moreover, it located human action not as the product of material conditions or abstract values but rather in the context of complex social, political, and economic dynamics in which both material conditions and ways of thinking could serve as either resources or constraints. Put another way, I realized that human relations and actions were dictated not by any sort of “law,” whether material or ideal, but rather through the contingent play of various forces. Much to my own surprise (especially because Fried never attempted to influence my analysis and argument), my senior thesis argued that the English civil war could be understood only in terms of the interplay between British colonial expansion and local political structures. This interest in the operation and effects of colonialism has continued to influence my work. Equally influential was Michael Taussig’s book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), which was assigned in two different courses during my senior year. As soon as I began reading this book, I realized that one could sidestep debates over materialism versus symbolism altogether if one viewed the principal task of the anthropologist as being not to explain the odd behaviors of other peoples but rather to use an understanding of other people’s beliefs to provide a political critique of one’s own culture. In other words, the question was not how material practices and symbolically mediated beliefs determine one another within a society, but rather how the material practices of our society influence or even coerce material practices in other societies and how the beliefs of people in other societies could be used to critique our own beliefs. Thus 297

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

neither the crudest material practices nor the most rarified or obscure beliefs could be understood without reference to the other. For me at least Taussig’s work crossed two boundaries: a geographic divide in the Americas, and a theoretical divide in anthropology. One of the classes in which Taussig’s book was assigned was Indians of Central and South America, in which Professor Libbet Crandon assigned to each student the task of picking a country and interviewing people from both the political left and the right (or a representative of that country’s interests and a representative of U.S. interests). I chose Guatemala and visited the offices of a group in solidarity with the peoples of Guatemala. I was shocked by the sight of walls covered with children’s drawings depicting the slaughter of civilians by soldiers or helicopter gunships. Having grown up with the Vietnam War, I was cynical about U.S. foreign policy yet proud of my country when President Carter ordered that we cease selling arms to Guatemala’s dictator, General José Efrain Ríos Montt. I learned, however, that American companies such as Hughes’ Tool and Bell Helicopter Textron were selling civilian helicopters to Guatemala— with instructions for mounting machine guns onto the sides. I had not yet crossed a physical border, but I became acutely and painfully aware of the kinds of borders my country’s government and industries crossed all the time. Simply by being an American, I felt complicit in these acts— and suddenly crossed an emotional and political boundary. For this reason alone upon graduating I went to Guatemala to learn Spanish and thus, upon returning to Columbia for graduate study, identified myself as a “Latin Americanist” and began working closely with the department’s Amazonianist, Robert Murphy. Murphy utterly disdained poststructuralist theorists in vogue at the time (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) and was generally thought by students to be a structuralist. In time, however, I concluded that more than anything he thought of himself as a trickster, and I learned from him important points that would later lead me to poststructuralism: that different political arrangements (especially within the academy) produce different forms of knowledge, and that structures exist to be played with, whether by the anthropologist or the student protestors of the 1960s (central themes of 298

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

his 1971 book, The Dialectics of Social Life).8 Moreover, Murphy was acutely aware of the ways that social structures, whether local or global, could both constrain individuals and open up new opportunities, a fact that often left an individual in an uncertain and ambivalent relationship to his or her own culture.9 More important than Murphy’s influence, in my first core course in graduate school—just one year before Kathy received her PhD in 1986—I was assigned a range of articles written by Franz Boas (who founded the anthropology department at Columbia). I discovered that the things I liked most about Fried—the commitment to empiricism, the attentiveness to history, the conviction of the importance of words and structures as heuristic devices that should be questioned rather than taken for granted—came from Boas. It goes without saying that in each course our instructors assigned us a host of readings representing different periods in the history of anthropology, different theoretical commitments, and different intellectual traditions. Nevertheless, there was something almost insular about my training at Columbia, which was self-consciously aware of the “Boasian tradition.” In fact, we all quickly learned that this insularity was largely an institutionalized expression of the strained relationship between the anthropology department and the university administration. These tensions were fundamentally political. Although Franz Boas was a dedicated empiricist who felt that his theoretical (such as they were) and methodological commitments could be evaluated and justified only on scientific grounds, he was also vocal about his left-wing politics and had a legendarily contentious relationship with the right-wing president of Columbia, Nicholas Murray Butler, who could not get rid of Boas but could limit his ability to hire additional professors (Murphy 1991, 71–72).10 Tensions with the administration flared again in the 1960s, when several Columbia anthropologists vocally supported, and in many cases marched with, student protesters.11 Students occupied many campus buildings and picketed the administration, and several instructors and professors formed an ad hoc faculty committee that urged the administration to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the protest. 299

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

On April 24, 1968, two hundred members of the committee signed a statement declaring, among other things, that faculty would stand outside occupied buildings to prevent the police or others from entering forcibly. The protest culminated on April 30 in a violent clash between approximately one thousand police officers and an equal number of students, 720 of whom were arrested. Several faculty members were arrested as well, including anthropologist Alex Alland Jr. Marvin Harris appeared on television chastising the university administration; and at a meeting of general faculty, Morton Fried (then chair of the department) indicted the administration as responsible for the violence. After these events relations between the anthropology department and the university were especially tense, and the department began to close in on itself.12 One of the things I most valued in my Columbia training was the consistent example of how our professors’ theoretical positions emerged out of their engagement with their own ethnographic research—an experience that continues to inspire me today. But there was little sense that we were engaged in any theoretical debates occurring at other universities. Nevertheless, three books that had nothing to do with any tradition among Columbia anthropologists dominated student debates while I was in graduate school. The first was actually written by a Columbia professor of English and comparative literature: Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Although Said’s book was concerned primarily with Western discourses about Arab cultures, his argument (drawing on the works of Michel Foucault)—that “Orientalism” is not so much a body of disinterested and objective knowledge as a discourse through which power constituted both the colonizing Occident and the subjugated Orient—was a fundamental (if indirect) challenge to cultural anthropology. It raised the possibility that we did not research cultures, but rather that our research actually constituted its own object of study, that is, created cultures. Put another way, our scientific attempts to “represent” (in the sense of “to portray”) other cultures too often functioned to “represent” (in the sense of “to serve as the spokesperson or agent for”) other people politically. This challenge inaugurated the “crisis of representation” in anthropology, which fundamentally centered on the question: “who are we to speak for others?” 300

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

Anthropology’s main response to Said’s challenge took the form of two much-discussed books published in 1986: James Clifford and George Marcus’s edited volume Writing Culture, and George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Both books focused on “ethnography” as a literary genre and on how ethnographic discourse is produced through ethnographic texts. For these reasons many—at least, many of us at Columbia—understood this as a “literary turn” in anthropological theorizing. Given the shadow cast by the departed Marvin Harris, it was hard to see these books as anything other than the latest iteration of symbolic or interpretive anthropology just turned into itself. Even for those of us who were dissatisfied with Harris’s materialism, there was something vaguely dissatisfying about these books. Part of this, as I suggested above, might have reflected the residue of earlier debates at Columbia.13 But I think our dissatisfaction also owed to our fundamentally visceral appreciation of and commitment to the Columbia tradition (see Murphy 1991). I say “visceral” because I have come to understand this tradition as pretheoretical (Moore 2004). I sensed this spirit when, as a fledgling graduate student, I found myself in an environment “more interested in dissonance than in balance, more attuned to conflict than accommodation, and more concerned with processes of change than with equilibrium” (Murphy 1991, 71). Although no one could question that Clifford, Marcus, and Fischer were raising serious concerns about ethnographic representation, they seemed to be referring to, or taking as their point of departure, an anthropology that we were fundamentally unfamiliar with.14 And for those of us who had read Dell Hymes’s 1969 edited volume, Reinventing Anthropology—a book that Kathy had to read and confront as an undergraduate student— the Clifford-Marcus-Fischer critique of anthropology seemed strangely apolitical. Moreover, it seemed that they spent far less time confronting the question of “who are we to speak for others?” in favor of an analysis of “how have we spoken for others?” I did and continue to believe that this is an important question, but their various answers did not help me decide how to position myself vis-à-vis the Shuar, a group of Amazonian Indians who had already established their ability to represent themselves and with whom I planned to begin my doctoral dissertation work. 301

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kf: back north to a job in the southwest While Steven was immersed in his graduate program at Columbia, I returned to Illinois from Quito in 1982 to finish my degree. Just as I began to hammer out the idea that I would try to include all of it within my dissertation: urban and rural; indigenous and nonindigenous; colonial and postcolonial history; exploitation and resistance; agrarian reform and urbanization; community organization and municipal appropriation; gender and class; and ritual performance and place in a manner that would be relevant to people’s lives, not serve the ends of power, and not allow “theory” to trump lived accounts—I got a job. I moved 1,200 miles away to southwestern Colorado, where it would take me three years not only to complete my degree but also to liberate my consciousness from graduate school. Once I began to really pay attention to my surroundings—to the politics of knowledge production in a state institution; to the more than seven hundred Native American students representing nearly 130 tribes attending the college; to the competition for resources between Hispanic and Native American campus interests; to the mystique about Native American “heritage” expressed through tourism and archaeological site management; to the presence of two Indian reservations on either side of our campus and the ways they were deeply tied to our institution’s history; to the erasure of this history except when it was important to highlight and rewrite selected parts for public relations purposes; to the New Age activities all over the region that interfaced (and often conflicted) with the college curriculum; to the image of Colorado as a mecca for self-actualization and learning and its reality as a conservative, anti-intellectual, and often racist remnant of Manifest Destiny—once I started paying attention to all of this, my research questions, answers, and observational sites changed in significant ways. Some of what I learned led me to look back on my dissertation with horror (a common enough experience) after I had already published it in Ecuador and presented portions of it at meetings. Although I thought I had allowed the voices of those I interviewed to speak with minimal “interpretive interference” on my part, I realized that I had imposed the 302

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

identity of Runa—the Quichua-language term for “human being”—on these particular urban residents when they did not so identify. Confident that my analysis pointed to a deeper essential reality than my consultants would admit because of the perils of being “Indian” in Ecuador, I made the mistake of imposing predefined categories on them. I realized—less through any kind of reading of anthropological critiques of essentialism than from spending time with North American Native students—that just because many Cotocollao residents had “runa” names and engaged in “runa” dances and ate “runa” food, this did not necessarily make them Runa. Who they were was multiple, a function of their location within the regional and local economies, of who they were talking to, of what emotions they were feeling, and of their familial and personal strategies for success and upward mobility. This issue reflects what Steven expressed above, namely, whether the anthropologist has the right to speak for others, to provide labels for them, or to otherwise “represent” their realities. Upon reflection I believe I identified many of the residents of Cotocollao as Runa “strategically,” to use Gayatri Spivak’s concept (1993), in order to “ennoble” their urban poverty and thereby emphasize to outsiders their flexible, creative, and often successful use of a wide variety of survival strategies, in ways I saw as “basically” Indian, and brought out for performance at certain key times in the year. Nevertheless, although the residents of this urban-rural interface may have “strategically employed” ritual practices they perhaps knew would identify them as “Indians,” this did not mean that I had the liberty to do so. My understandings of identity and power(lessness) were also influenced by the conditions of class and culture in Durango, Colorado, where a large population of Hispanic descent lives “on the other side of the tracks,” largely unnoticed by the busloads of tourists who arrive to ski, ride the narrow-gauge train, shop, and hike. My more direct experiences, however, were in the classroom. The need to devise high-quality, truthful, and relevant education for Native American students grew as consciousness was raised around the world regarding the five-century cumulative effects of the euphemistically termed “Columbian encounter.” Hundreds 303

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

of events were organized in the early 1990s to celebrate, protest, or take strategic advantage of the 1992 quincentenary. Because a large percentage of these events were international in scope, Native American consciousness at Fort Lewis College took on international dimensions that allowed me to bring the study of Andean peoples into the classroom in new ways and to widen discussions regarding the multiple meanings of “Indian” and “American.” Perhaps the most important event that served to synthesize (and at times generate new conflicts) between the classroom, the administrative realms of the college, the region, and Native North America as a whole was passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) in 1990. As anthropology department chair I had to organize collective efforts to bring in representatives of about twenty-five different tribes to consult with us in completing our inventory of Native human remains and cultural objects covered under the law. To do so meant that I had to focus on the ethnographic, legal, ethical, museological, and pedagogical aspects of holding, representing, and teaching about Native American bodies, minds, and objects. I was also contracted to cowrite (see Judge and Fine-Dare 1995) the nagpra cultural affiliation report for

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Mesa Verde National Park. These two activities served to suddenly locate my work (teaching plus research) within rather than outside the federal government, an ironic move considering that I had recently published a critique of federal influence on interpretation and the concomitant resistance to this by interpreters in the national parks (Fine 1988). The irony brought me back once again to the lessons learned in northwest Quito about the dangers of binary oppositions that have little truth value or use except insofar as they serve to set up political rhetoric. Just as I could not clearly label the residents of Cotocollao as “Indians” and “non-Indians,” neither could I draw a line between “Indians” and “the government” or “Indians” and “anthropologists,” considering that Indians are employed as both (FineDare 2002). The work of repatriation was to consume most of my time, taking me far from Ecuador for many years. 304

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

sr: from graduate school to the field and back What Kathy was to discover from her work in the classroom and in managing repatriation consultations I was to confront when I made the first tentative steps to conducting fieldwork among the Shuar, a group of about fifty thousand Indians most of whom live in Morona Santiago (one of Ecuador’s Amazonian provinces), in October 1988. Having deferred responding to Edward Said’s challenge to examine the West’s role in the formation of our objects of study, I embarked on what might seem an absurd as well as impossible synthesis of Boas’s, Fried’s, Murphy’s, and Taussig’s theoretical concerns when I left for Ecuador to examine the relationship between leaders of the Shuar Federation and Shuar shamans. I decided to work with the Shuar when I learned that they had organized one of the first indigenous federations in Ecuador and in the Amazon basin, in order to promote their own political autonomy and to represent themselves to missionaries, settlers, and the state. Although I entered the field with a lingering desire to mark a sharp divide between Amazonian Indians and other Latin Americans (including highland Indians), it was the Shuar’s historical resistance to and engagement with colonialism that led me to seek to work with them. Nevertheless, I interpreted the establishment of the federation and the continuation of non-Christian practices such as shamanism as oppositional to the state and missionaries. I therefore conceived of my research on Shuar society in terms of two clear boundaries: one between the federation as a modern institution and shamanism as a traditional institution, and another between the Shuar and the Ecuadorians. Like Kathy, however, my experiences in the field soon disrupted my understanding of cultural and institutional boundaries. Not only did Shuar not conceive of the difference between the federation and shamanism in terms of the difference between modernity and tradition; they expressed no sort of opposition between the federation and shamanism at all. Of the three shamans I worked with most closely—those considered most powerful and well known—I learned that one was a former president of the federation and still worked for the federation, while another was among 305

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

the founders of the federation, although he had gone through long periods of disaffection for the organization. Nor did I find any evidence of some complex relationship between the federation and shamans. For example, everyone I spoke to assured me that the former president’s vocation as shaman had nothing to do with his election to that position; instead they gave me various other reasons why he had been elected to that position. Nor could I discover any pattern of shamans regularly occupying positions of authority within the federation. I did learn that Shuar were divided over their trust both in the federation and in shamanism. But these divisions had nothing to do with one’s stance toward “modernity” or “tradition.” Shuar supported the leadership of the federation when it was clear that it was furthering Shuar economic and political interests; they scorned the leadership when they believed it was corrupt. Shuar almost uniformly questioned shamans’ powers to heal and came to place their trust in a shaman when, after medical doctors had failed, the shaman had cured an illness. In both cases Shuar seemed to take pragmatic stances. More significantly, they saw no conflict between identifying themselves as Shuar and interacting with modern institutions such as markets and the state. As boundaries between abstract ideas such as “tradition” and “modernity,” “indigenous” and “Ecuadorian,” dissolved before my eyes, I came to recognize that other kinds of boundaries fade between things such as shamanic healing sessions, hospitals, churches, law courts, consensusbased decision making, elections, swidden horticulture, markets, and, yes, what are conventionally thought of as distinct races, ethnic groups, or peoples such as Shuar, Runa, Achuar, mestizo, and white. I saw people cross these boundaries every day, usually without any sense of ambivalence or disturbance. In time I came to see that these boundaries, whether relatively impermeable or porous, were ongoing but shifting accomplishments of a variety of actors. I quickly learned that however different the physical setting of the Shuar from that of Quiteños (residents of Quito), the kinds of problems one might study in highland cities—such as how people must contend for more resources while encountering the limits of their opportunities, 306

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

a personal struggle that often expresses itself in terms of conflicts within and between economic classes; the need to skirt the law without attracting the attention of those who are paid to enforce it; the need to make snap decisions about what to do when one encounters some new facet of a heterogeneous world—were surprisingly close to the kinds of problems facing Shuar on an almost daily basis, undercutting any idea that “Indians” were somehow different from other struggling populations in Ecuador. I learned that in order to understand the Shuar, I needed to learn about the Ecuadorian settlers (colonos) who had settled in the region, the Salesian missionaries (many from Europe) who had tried to convert Shuar to Catholicism but ended up helping them form a political federation (see Rubenstein 2005), the government bureaucrats in Cuenca and Quito who directed land policy and resources for both Shuar and colonos, and international nongovernmental organizations and human-rights organizations whose support has been crucial to the federation. I liked identifying myself as an Amazonianist, in part because I believed that my commitment to understanding the material conditions of people’s lives meant that ethnography must be rooted in a particular locale. Yet I knew that as long as I remain an anthropologist, my career will demand that I be as mobile as the Shuar, not only conducting research in different parts of Ecuador (and eventually New York) but also crossing theoretical and disciplinary boundaries, from indigenous social organization to political geography to political theory and back to indigenous cosmologies. I returned from the field in February 1992. Although I had come to feel at home in the community in which I had conducted most of my research, I still had deeply confused feelings about my relationships with the Shuar with whom I had lived. Moreover, I had no idea what kind of dissertation I would write. I couldn’t imagine writing anything that could represent the profound and often disorienting relationships and events I had experienced for the past three years and was still unsure what I could say that Shuar themselves had not. Consequently, I also had deeply confused feelings about my relationship to anthropology. With the help of friends and faculty I was eventually able to write and 307

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

defend my dissertation, the bulk of which focused on the relationship between conflicts among Shuar and those between Shuar and Ecuadorian settlers (that is, I analyzed various ways Shuar and settlers crossed over the boundary between them and back again). But its real accomplishment—at least that which has continued to serve me over the years—was to portray a dynamic society fully engaged with the historical transformations of the region during the twentieth century and to present individual Shuar as highly mobile, regularly crossing geographic and cultural boundaries.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

sr: translation and representation across borders Like many dissertations mine marked only the first step in analyzing and writing about Shuar society and its relationship to larger forces such as capitalism and the state. Also my deep ambivalence about my role as a producer of Shuar knowledge had stayed with me. Perhaps because of the influence of Clifford’s and Marcus and Fischer’s 1986 books, I continued to think of this as an issue of representation. In time, though, I came to see it instead as a problem inherent in border crossing. Traditionally anthropologists have understood this crossing in terms of “translation” (see Clifford and Marcus 1986, 24–25; Rosman and Rubel 2003). For example, Regna Darnell has observed that Franz Boas and his students saw themselves as translators not only because they translated indigenous texts into English but also because they translated indigenous oral stories into written texts (Darnell 1999; see also Crapanzano 1986, 51). Similarly, although Ruth Behar situates her encounter with Esperanza Hernández in terms of border crossings, she titled her book Translated Woman (1993), partially referring to her role in translating oral stories into written text (1993, 14) but also referring to her own transformation from listener to storyteller—that is, translating her role into Esperanza’s role (13). As Darnell and Behar note, these translations involve certain choices on the part of the anthropologist: to edit oral texts into a seamless written text or to translate the “pauses, shouts, whispers, interruptions, and digressions” (Behar 1993, 13), and to locate the translation somewhere in the continuum from the literal to the poetic (Darnell 1999, 251). 308

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

Other anthropologists have conceived of themselves as translators not because of their rhetorical choices in turning a text in one language into a text in another. Godfrey Lienhardt, for example, considered anthropologists to be translators because they re-present the modes of thought of one culture in the language of another (Lienhardt 1954; see Leach 1973, 772). As Talal Asad has observed, since the 1950s explaining anthropology in terms of cultural translation has become banal (1986, 141), although, as both Asad and Crapanzano argue, the power of the translator’s language, and of the translators themselves, subvert the power of the stories being told. For these reasons I think it is crucial, as Kathy has suggested, to understand the border crossings of the ethnographer as embodied, rather than merely in terms of translation and interpretation. It is precisely in the ways people do and do not cross boundaries that such boundaries take form and in effect constitute the very subjectivities we too often take for granted. This understanding embeds the ethnographer in transnational networks and commitments that constantly beckon a return to the field. Since I had not yet fulfilled my promise to Shuar that I would write a book, however, I considered myself in a state of ethnographic exile— unable to return not only to “the field” but to the people to whom I had made my promise. By the time I was appointed assistant professor at Ohio University, I had resolved my struggle with the “crisis of representation” through a clearer vision of ethnography. Rather than try to untangle political versus literary representation, I came to understand that my work would represent Shuar culture, but would also necessarily represent my politics. That is to say, I came to recognize my importance as a writer, not because I express myself through literary conventions, but because through those conventions I reveal my political positioning. This recognition coincided with, and was enabled by, a shift in concern away from asking what ethnography represents (or “means”) to how ethnography is used (and by whom). This is a question Taussig raises in his third book, The Nervous System: “After all, who benefits from studies of the poor, especially from their 309

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

resistance? The objects of study, or the cia?” (1992, 52). Taken literally this would be a paralyzing question. But as he makes clear several pages later, this challenge is only another way of applying his understanding of anthropology as cultural critique. Invoking an essay by Walter Benjamin, Taussig observes, “The sources of tradition flow to one’s heart’s content. . . . They converge to form the stream of tradition, and it is the tradition which forms our view of the source. But we must try not to be diverted by this spectacle. We must neither seek the reflection of the clouds in the stream nor run away from it so as to drink from the source and ‘pursue the matter itself’ behind people’s backs. He wants us to ask ‘Whose mills does this stream activate? Who is utilizing its power? Who dammed it?’” (1992, 63). The present volume’s attention to border crossings is both a symptom of and a response to anthropology’s encounter with globalization, the fact that people, objects, and ideas move more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before. As Walter Benjamin anticipated in the 1930s, such flows tempt some people to revel in their ability to see and even consume the exotic objects that now flit by both quickly and constantly, while other people react by embarking on a quest for origins and the original— whether it be called “authentic” by the tourist or “traditional” by the native. For Taussig as for Benjamin, however, the critical task is to shake off these reactions and search instead for those who have the power to regulate, redirect, and use these flows. These questions bring us back to boundaries and borders. This approach provides a basis not only for studying cultures but also for reappraising ethnography, both as research and as writing. The flow of anthropologists is determined not only by intellectual genealogies and personal interests but also by the willingness of the state or a private foundation to fund the work; in some cases, by the willingness of another state to grant a visa; and more and more by the willingness of people to invite anthropologists into their midst. And our books and articles cross similar borders as well, involving not only the willingness of a journal or press to publish the work but also the willingness of people to purchase and read it. 310

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

In a long preface to my dissertation, I struggled with the questions of how I could express myself and represent the Shuar at the same time. That struggle assumed the overriding importance of intentions—“the source,” in Taussig’s terms. As I turned my attention to the uses of anthropological knowledge, however, I came to realize that how readers might understand my work is of far greater consequence than my own intentions. This doesn’t sound like promising inspiration for an author, who must have some reason for writing. But I found this approach liberating. After all, my graduate school education had taught me that one of the pillars of social theory is that people are often unconscious of what motivates them. Applying this principle to myself was a relief, not because it made me less responsible for my acts, but because it rejected a privilege that, to some extent, I had been denying the Shuar. And just as I had argued that Shuar act from an uncertain position, I could now accept that I write from an uncertain position. In considering this I realized that my political obligations as one who writes about the Shuar, their culture, and their situation have less to do with the near-unsupportable claim that I can “speak for them” and more with the fact that future readers of my work—potentially including Shuar—may well put it to uses I did not intend or anticipate. I still have a responsibility for how and what I write, but I now have a sensible position from which to assume that responsibility, for books cross borders, too, and I needed to be cognizant of what might happen in the process. Before I could write, however, I needed to recross an important geographic border. In 1998 I broke a promise I had made to myself: still unpublished I applied for and received a grant to return to Ecuador for the summer. I was nerve wracked when I left Ohio. Over the past six years some friends in Ecuador had written to me, and sometimes I wrote back. I feared that most people would not remember me, and that those who did would be upset that I hadn’t written more (thus I projected my anxieties about my nonexistent book onto my too-few letters). After I landed at the airport in Macas (the capital of Morona Santiago), my first experiences were surreal: everything looked both vaguely familiar and unfamiliar, and 311

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

I did not know if that was because things had changed or because I had forgotten them. By the end of the first day, in any event, all my anxieties were allayed. Everyone I knew remembered me and was delighted to see that I had returned. This experience was repeated two years later, when I once again received funding for summer research. One evening I joined Silverio Jíntiach’, the current president of the federation (whom I first met in 1998), for a beer. Over the next half hour other officials of the federation joined us. Perhaps an hour later a jeep stopped in front of the bar, and Silverio called to its occupants to come over. Seldom have I had so many different kinds of conversations in such a short period of time. During what I think was the fifth or sixth round of toasts, to accompany our sixth or seventh round of beers, Silverio pointed at me with gusto and said, “This guy first came here when Puwáinchir was president, and he came back two years ago too! He really cares about us!” I recalled how it had taken me three years to develop relatively open working relationships (as well as relationships bound by friendship or fictive kinship); as a graduate student, I thought it was the amount of time I dedicated to my fieldwork that indicated the degree of my commitment to the Shuar. Certainly, I needed three years to achieve the most basic grasp of Shuar history and culture. Now, however, Silverio was teaching me that it was not the length of time I spent in Morona Santiago but rather the number of times I left and returned that provided the measure of my commitment. The commitment of which I now write is not just an element of my personal relationship with individual Shuar or with the Shuar Federation. I believe that this commitment provides both the moral and epistemological basis for my ability to write about the Shuar. For years I had told myself that I had to write a book before I went back. Now I understood that I had to go back before I could write a book. In 2001 I finally published an article, drawing on my dissertation research but now engaging political geography, that noted that prior to Ecuadorian colonization Shuar space was organized through multiple and overlapping boundaries (involving gender, kinship, warrior alliances, and networks of shamans) so that it was virtually impossible to cross 312

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

one without crossing several others. I argued that one of the signal accomplishments of colonialism was not only that it created new boundaries (territorial, political, and economic) but also that it organized these boundaries at different, nested scales—thus locating social formations within a spatial hierarchy. For example, several households form a centro, several centros form an association, and several associations form the federation. That this seems like a natural form of political organization is precisely the point, because it reflects our understanding of spatial relations. But it was new to the Shuar. Despite this reorganization of space, Shuar continue to conceive of other boundaries as overlapping and porous. This fact became an important element of my book, Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History (2002). Through a narrative of Alejandro’s life, I reveal that while Shuar understand the clear boundary (territorial and political) between the Shuar Federation and spaces of Ecuadorian colonization, they continue to conceive of social and cultural boundaries as multiple, many of which cross territorial and political boundaries established by the Ecuadorian state as if they were nonexistent. Thus, even though the Shuar Federation continues to have great legitimacy as the primary representative of the Shuar nation, no one suggests that people who challenge the authority of the federation, or even leave the organization, cease to be Shuar. Indeed, the territorial boundary of the federation contains within it a variety of other boundaries (e.g., involving kinship or shamanism) that are both predicates for the formation of new social relations and sites of intense social conflict. Just as important, I tried to situate the book itself in terms of the ways readers might cross borders through the act of reading. As I recount in the book, when I first met Alejandro I had only recently arrived in Ecuador and had not yet received authorization from the federation to conduct research. When I told Alejandro this, he replied, “So what? I am a Shuar. The federation has no right to tell me what to do. I am a man and do what I please. If the federation won’t give you permission, you can still work with me.” As it turned out, the federation did give me authorization, and Alejandro and I did end up working together. 313

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

Although I use this initial Hobson’s choice to illuminate some of the political dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork, at the end of the book I reframe it to highlight the political dilemmas of writing and reading. Many of Alejandro’s stories are of conflicts within the federation, of accusations of corruption among its leadership, and of Alejandro’s bitterness that the federation has often failed him. If I privilege my position as writer, I am faced with another Hobson’s choice: Do I report these stories as accurately as I can? Or do I edit them to protect the federation from external critique? Instead of answering these questions as a writer, I realized I had to situate myself as a reader—metaphorically, in that Alejandro was telling these stories to me; literally, in that I was now reading the narrative I had just put together for publication. I realized that I was reading them in a particular way, because of my situation in the field. As an anthropologist I had always tried to maintain a neutral position in regard to several conflicts: between Alejandro and his kin, between competing shamans, among federation leaders, and between the federation and splinter organizations (with two or three exceptions, I believe I succeeded). Now I was reading Alejandro’s stories as a continuation of our first encounter: his extended explanation of why I should work with him rather than the federation authorities. This may have been his conscious intention, but as I recalled our conversations, relistened to their taped recordings, and reread his stories in their immediate context, I found no evidence that he was consciously trying to influence the way I went about my work or my choices of whom else I should interview. Nor am I claiming it was his unconscious intention. All I can say is “this is how I read it.” I believe my analysis is valuable not because it provides a “correct” interpretation of Alejandro’s stories but because it reveals the responsibility readers have for their own interpretations of the stories. My interviews, like those conducted by Ruth Behar, crossed a border between Alejandro and me. But after publication the book crosses (with my help and that of the publisher) the border between Alejandro and everyone who will read it. Those readers cannot enter into a dialogue with Alejandro, as I did. But if they can take responsibility for their own responses to his stories, 314

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

they will have taken their own first steps to becoming border crossers themselves

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

kf: home work Steven’s struggles to represent Alejandro Tsakimp’s intentions, voice, and possible agendas resonate with my own struggles to work (both in the classroom and on the written page) in a way that acknowledges both my own responsibilities and those of my audience. Also, although I agree with James Peacock (1998) that anthropologists need to be more engaged in the communities where they work, I believe this engagement should be deepened through reflection upon and analysis of the paths that led them there and to what ends. As we indicated at the beginning of this essay, publishing such reflections opens one to accusations of megalomania. For me this has meant developing a few mutually informing “homework” tasks, all of which relate to the intersection between my current academic employment demands and research interests: (1) applying my experiences and scholarship regarding repatriation of Native American human remains and cultural objects to South American contexts and materials; (2) developing critiques of the academic practices of my institution when I feel they are inconsistent with the educational values they espouse, particularly regarding the peoples of the Southwest United States; (3) discovering ways to honestly discuss in my writing, particularly the writing aimed for a classroom audience often filled with Native American and Hispanic students, the complexities of identity formation, construction, and “invention” without engaging in self-censorship; and (4) paying serious attention in the classroom to Native American and Hispanic concerns, as these students (particularly the former) are often seated in my classes and periodically invite me to visit their homes and communities. Since I demonstrate the first task in an earlier chapter of this book, I will not go into detail here. The second task is too specific to my workplace to elaborate at this point.15 The third task is currently under way: I write for this book with the hope that Steven and I and others can also find it useful in the classroom, 315

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

which in many ways is a tougher “beat” than the writing desk because of the immediacy of the experience of knowledge exchange and the more immediate consequences of being misunderstood. One strategy I have employed has been to use separately or in counterpoint works about North and South American natives to illuminate the great similarities and differences across the Rio Grande. For example, Paul Radin’s Autobiography of a Winnebago (1963) illustrates the internal conflicts of identity and self-actualization that can occur in situations of change and domination. A comparison to this account that I have used comes from the epilogue of Laura Graham’s 1995 book, Performing Dreams, which is based on her work among the Xavante of Brazil. In this account a young man named Riridu creates a space for himself in the community by essentially fabricating his connections to the spirits in a manner not unlike Paul Radin’s Winnebago subject, Sam Blowsnake, who, in Radin’s account, lied about receiving a vision during his quest on the hill in order to avoid criticism. When I use these texts, the question invariably arises concerning whether Radin and Graham behaved responsibly in revealing their subjects’ subterfuge, and whether I have behaved responsibly in requiring my students to read texts that show the complexities of being Native American in a less than flattering light. The choices presented to us are outright censorship of scholarship, which few advocate, or denouncing scholars as irresponsible when they act as Graham did in revealing that Riridu’s “spirit watch” came not from the spirit world but from a market where Graham herself observed the purchase (Graham 1995, 230).16 I think there may be a third choice, one where scholars broaden their concerns over position, affect, and voice to match the global circumstances in which our work takes its effects, and one where we all investigate more into the outer circle of ripples caused by the stones we throw into the sea of knowledge. This choice contributes to the fourth task. I return to 1992 when a Wisconsin Oneida colleague and I taught a cross-hemispherical honors course focused on the theme “Five Hundred Years of Resistance.” After a lecture I gave about Andean experiences of millennialism and political resistance, an indigenous woman from 316

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

Michigan asked “what religion” these South American Indians followed. Hearing they were “mostly Catholic,” she pronounced them “not really Indians.” She had signed up to learn about “real Indians” and their struggles for self-determination, she said. She did not want to spend time on inauthentic “hang-around-the-fort,” “mixed blood,” “apple” Indians who seemed to represent a step backward in self-determination. Something similar happened in 2003 when in a class I cotaught on resistance movements a few Native American students expressed bewilderment at having been assigned Nightwatch, Orin Starn’s book about Peruvian civil-defense groups. “Are these Indians or what?” one Navajo man asked. “What has this got to do with the Indian movement?” A different type of confrontation occurred when a few years ago a Native American student I had never met came to my office and demanded to know if I was “the one who uses that book Savages in [my Amazon] class.” When I nodded in the affirmative, the young man asked angrily, “So you think we’re savages, or what?” I nervously invited the student to sit down and then explained that the book was journalist Joe Kane’s account of the ways that oil companies have proven themselves to be the true “savages” in the Amazon. I gave a brief account of the ways the Waorani of Ecuador have been stigmatized as savages since at least the time of the Inca empire by all intruders into their territory, indigenous and otherwise. I performed in a heart-pounding two minutes the same task I face for an entire term when I teach courses on the Andes and the Amazon that help to subtly illustrate that many North Americans—Indians and non-Indians alike—carry attitudes of “exceptionalism” and even arrogant ignorance regarding peoples who live outside our national borders. Be that as it may, I felt no sense of pedagogical or moral victory when that young man left my office seeming somewhat mollified if deflated, admitting to me that he ought to read the book for himself. Rather, I realized that we live in a time when we can no longer rely on irony to make political points. No book these days about Native North Americans would get published with the title Savages splashed over a Richard Avedon–produced photo of a naked Ben Nighthorse Campbell or Russell Means, as it was over Moi Mengatohue (the Waorani leader who was so disaffected by 317

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

all the frustration and media attention over his activism that he dropped out of indigenous political life for a time). It appears clear—through photographs, television documentaries, and exhibitions of South American human remains in North America—that regardless of clever wordplays such as Joe Kane’s, South American Native peoples are indeed viewed as the last remaining “savages” in the hemisphere. Thus the objections launched by the young man in my office have enough truth behind them that offering pedagogical clarity is less than honest. Steven Rubenstein encountered a similar dilemma when he had to decide how to frame—ultimately, how to take responsibility for—Tsakimp’s critical account of the Shuar Federation. The responses to the ethics of knowledge flows I have experienced with Native students in the classroom—as well as from colleagues, both Native and non-Native, who evince a censorship emanating from “imperialist nostalgia” or a sense of “despondency” (see Sahlins 1999)—have their origins in the field-based dialogues and ethnographic practices that so often are erased before they reach the final publication edit. The professional autobiographies woven together in this chapter are but two specific illustrations of more general trends of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as the relationships between self and other, society and culture, are pursued with intricate heartache. Recent events have transformed what it has meant to be an “Americanist” as well as a South, Middle, or North American outwardly to the ethnoscape, upwardly to the skyscraper, and inwardly to the scarred psyche. Consequently, indigenous activism and transnational exchanges of knowledge that go far beyond dialogues with indigenous peoples have reached the awareness of people across the globe in ways enormously enhanced by the reach of the Internet. Not only has the North/South Native Web site managed by Ecuadorianist Marc Becker provided a tangible, visible field where indigenous educational border crossing has been facilitated in remarkable ways, but the sophisticated Web sites constructed by formerly marginalized peoples all over the continent have provided even more instant access to at least “officially sanctioned” points of view constructed by these 318

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

organizations.17 Where once there was almost complete silence, now one must find cautiously informed paths through the infinitely recursive links to information. No longer can any of our students—Native American or otherwise—plead ignorance regarding the existence of peoples engaged in similar yet distinctive social, environmental, and cultural struggles across the globe. Since the Columbian quincentenary these processes have intensified and in some cases have been institutionalized, and reinstitutionalized, as older institutions become transformed. The Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues was established by the United Nations and held its first meeting in New York City in 2000, the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was observed from 1995–2004, the National Museum of the American Indian opened on the Washington Mall in 2004, and the Native Hawaiian Reorganization Act was proposed in 2007 (s res. 310 and hr res. 505).18 One of the things we have learned is that Native American studies programs in North America could benefit greatly by including much more integration of Latin American indigenist research, and vice versa. Except for brief references to Weston LaBarre or Georges Devereux (anthropologists who wrote about “messianic” movements such as the Ghost Dance) by writers such as Joanne Rappaport in her 1993 study of Colombian messianism or by Frank Salomon in his 1983 study of Andean colonial shamanic practices, there has been precious little cross-continental comparative work. The quincentennial brought forth several popular compendia of musings on the Americas, but it was rare to see any systematic comparisons that challenged existing theories, histories, or stereotypes. Work needs to be done that compares the views on everything from sovereignty to repatriation to the links between territory and religious practices so that North American Indians are not tempted to dismiss Latin Americans as “corrupted” by Catholicism, and Latin American indigenes are not tempted to view those in the North as “índio gringos” on the verge of extinction. One interesting example of cross-border work is Elizabeth CookLynn’s essay on the ways that the literary genre of magical realism has 319

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

the lizard’s dream

influenced North American Indian writing, to the detriment of the latter because, in part, of the tendency to forget that Spanish is “as colonizing a language as any” and that the interest in magical realism is “another generic imposition upon the indigenous story,” once again relegating indigenous cultural repertoires to the realm of “the unreal,” “the magical,” or “the mythical” (1998, 133). Unfortunately, Cook-Lynn goes no further in looking for instructive parallels in Latin American indigenous work, and there are almost no examples of influences moving in the other direction (except perhaps the important musings about identity from Bolivian anthropologist Xavier Albó [1995] or the obvious hemispherical lessons to be found in the work of Brazilian anthropologist Alcida Ramos [1994], who warns us about creating a “hyperreal Indian” to make our points). As the debates over the Rigoberta Menchú controversy (see Arias and Chin 2001) make clear, there is a great need for additional and multidirectional cross-border research and reflection. Cautious critiques provided by Native intellectuals in North America of biographies that are not grounded in indigenous cultural practice and that therefore cannot serve as a source for pristine indigenous narrative or knowledge (again, see Cook-Lynn 1995) provide one starting point. There is a growing literature written by Native American authors regarding these questions, one that needs to become a formally recognized and valued part of any “new” view of Americanist studies. Moreover, scholars and activists throughout the Americas increasingly appreciate the need for translation of more works written in Spanish, Portuguese, and Native languages into English, and vice versa, as the disparities in access to knowledge across the hemisphere continue to keep communication at a sad minimum. Perhaps what is called the intercultural movement in South America has something to tell those of us struggling with such issues north of the Rio Grande (Rappaport 2005). In 2001 Kathy reviewed an article submitted by one of this volume’s authors, Les Field, for the Journal of Latin American Anthropology. Field’s article addressed the possible reasons that “talking about Indians” seemed to be a hemispheric matter indeed, especially in terms of the conflicting views about what one can broach academically regarding North American 320

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

rubenstein and fine-dare

Indian identity and what one can talk about regarding “Latin American” Native peoples (Field 2002). Reflecting on this dilemma, which is related to the differences in historical relationships to land, ethnic cleansing, and political protest permitted by the state, Kathy wanted to know more about other scholars’ thought on the matter and how they managed to write and/or lecture about it. She therefore organized the aaa session that led to this book. Kathy’s invitation came at an auspicious time in Steven’s research. Although his dissertation research was necessarily multisited, the political boundaries of the Shuar Federation provided him with a conceptual, as well as a territorial, “locale” in which to situate his work. During summer research in Ecuador in 2000, however, he shifted his focus from the internal politics of the Shuar Federation to the relationship between Shuar and the Ecuadorian indigenous movement. He also knew that Shuar leaders acted on a global stage, traveling to Rio de Janeiro, Washington dc, New York, and Geneva to meet with other indigenous leaders—and that other Shuar, less privileged, had traveled to New York and Los Angeles in search of work. Kathy’s panel thus provided him not only with an occasion to reflect on the situation of Shuar migrants but just as importantly with a timely opportunity to step back from his own work on the Shuar and place it in a larger context (see his own essay in this volume). The scholarship included in this book builds on the “Americanist tradition” in ways informed by the personal experiences of its contributors, in an explicit attempt to address conceptual, migratory, experiential, and disciplinary border crossings. Although this is certainly not a sufficient response to the increasingly violent realities of this hemisphere, we hope that it will be viewed as an important step, one taken in other academic arenas lately (e.g., the “From the Local to the Global” theme of the 2003 Congress of Latin Americanists). Our hope is that broadened and denationalized programs in Latin American, American, and American Indian studies can bring our embodied selves to the Americas in the way that mere contemplation of global ethnoscapes cannot. All Americans are necessarily border crossers. Perhaps the previous chapters—tales told by professional border crossers—have suggested 321

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

new ways of imagining these borders and the views they offer and have provided a heightened awareness of how they can affect us, sometimes to fall, sometimes to soar. We hope that by the end of this volume the reader can close her eyes and dream of America, smell the hominy and sweet grass, feel icy winds reach down from sacred peaks, watch green ribbons of leafcutter ants head home in an Amazonian downpour, and smell the cut of a hoof in the pampas. But we must dream these American dreams like a lizard, eyes wide open, always vigilant, often critical, and definitely on the move home. notes This essay was difficult to write and involved the good will of many patient readers. In particular we would like to thank Norman Whitten, Jean Scandlyn, and Byron Dare for providing excellent suggestions for improvement. We also gratefully acknowledge the many professors, field consultants, and friends both North and South without whom none of this discussion could have taken place. 1. Examples of such critiques are Caulfield 1974; Gough 1968; Willis 1974; Worsley 1964. 2. Also, and somewhat in hindsight, an influence on my choice of field areas came from having worked in the anthropology department of the Field MuCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

seum of Natural History in Chicago in 1975–76, when the curator of South American anthropology, the late Donald Collier, called to the American public’s attention the autochthonous nature of the South American past through the exhibit Ancient Ecuador: Culture, Clay, and Creativity. Collier’s passion for Ecuador and for communicating University of Illinois professor Donald Lathrap’s ideas regarding the early tropical forest and coastal seats of South American civilization launched dozens of North American graduate students into archaeological work in Latin America. See Zeidler, this volume, for an extended discussion. 3. Casagrande’s students included Kathy Klumpp, who conducted intensive fieldwork in the Otavalo region of highland Ecuador; Joanne Rappaport, who has worked for many years in Colombia; Jim Belote and Linda Belote, who have conducted more research in southern Ecuador among the indigenous Saraguro people than any other North American scholars; the late 322

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

Muriel Crespi, who enjoyed a long career with the U.S. National Park Service heading their ethnography program after conducting field research in highland Ecuador; and Hugo Burgos, an Ecuadorian anthropologist. 4. See, for example, Bunker 1988; Butterworth 1980; Casagrande 1981; Lathrap 1970; Salomon 1980 and 1981; and Zuidema 1990 for a taste of Illinois Americanist anthropology before the 1990s. Also see the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, archives for the works of Americanists such as Julian Steward, Oscar Lewis, and Demetri Shimkin: www.library.uiuc .edu/archives/archon/index.php?p=core%2Fsearch&settheme=uarchi vesnew&g=anthropology (accessed January 1, 2009). 5.Vine Deloria Jr. (1998) once said that Indians get popular every decade or so, and then they just get kicked around again once the excitement dies down. By the turn of the millennium in both hemispheres, it looked as if the popularity was here to stay, activism on both sides of the border fed through a proliferation of Web sites (e.g., NativeWeb, www.nativeweb.org [accessed January 1, 2009]) and international events (see Fine-Dare 2005). 6. The methodological tradition of digging deeply into informants’ consciousness to discover hidden treasures about which they themselves are unaware has deep roots in anthropology. In the 1970s my graduate program offered Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

no courses on field methods for nonarchaeologists, so we relied on guidance from our faculty committees and cobbled-together readings from Notes and Queries to get a sense of what to do “in the field.” In addition to some very good practical advice I received from my advisor, I felt enormous pressure from other faculty members to avoid the practical and above all the political, and to concentrate on “decoding” the Andean present in order to access the more important Andean past. 7. The typical examples were Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966), Victor Turner (1967), David Schneider (1968), Clifford Geertz (1973), and Marshall Sahlins (1976, after his so-called conversion to structuralism.) 8. The trickster identity fits Murphy in part because he was a protégé of Julian Steward, thus allowing him to place himself on both sides of the “materialist” versus “idealist” divide (a disciplinary distinction that I soon learned he disdained; after all, while Steward was most famous for his theories on 323

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

cultural evolution and ecology, his doctoral dissertation was a study of the trickster motif among North American Indians). 9. This is evident in his classic article “Defiance and Social Control I: What Makes Waru Run?” (Murphy 1961). 10. During World War I Boas wrote a letter to the New York Times challenging the Wilsonian project of imposing American values on other societies, and later wrote a letter to The Nation condemning the U.S. government’s use of anthropologists as spies (following publication of this letter, Boas was expelled from the National Research Council and censured by the American Anthropological Association). 11. The 1968 uprising began as a protest against plans to build a new university gymnasium in a public park in Harlem, and the revelation that Columbia University had lied when it denied being a member of the Institute for Defense Analyses (a nonprofit research institute formed by the Department of Defense in the 1950s to advise and conduct strategic, operational, and analytical research of concern to the U.S. military during the cold war). 12. When I began graduate school, there were only eight tenured professors (including Fried, who died the following year), most of whom were Columbia PhDs. Moreover, I learned that the university had turned down every Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

candidate for tenure for the past ten or so years. The youngest tenured professor was forty-eight years old, and the assistant professors were nervous. It was not until 1989 that the university accepted a departmental candidate for tenure and slowly began to support a rebuilding of the department. 13. See Allen Chun’s striking contrast between the critical approaches of Murphy (1971) and Clifford (1983) (Chun 2001, 570–72). 14. We had read works by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (works that had certainly influenced anthropologists elsewhere, for example, at Harvard and Chicago), but I don’t think any of my classmates saw either one as the basis for our anthropology. We were fascinated by Clifford’s, Marcus’s, and Fischer’s questions, but had to work very hard to connect them to the kinds of anthropology we anticipated doing. 15. I refer to my (often unpopular) critique on campus of our program of 324

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

Southwest studies into which “Native American” and “Hispanic” studies are subsumed, the former receiving approval to move forward as a major program only in 2005. Briefly, the problems raised in general by the Southwest culture-area concept illuminates in regionally grounded fashion the seeming irreconcilability of Native American and Latin American studies in the United States (the first framed by the Indian wars; the second by the cold war) in any but a completely depoliticized space, one informed far more by the tourist-business entrepreneur Fred Harvey than by the anthropologist Edward Spicer (1962), who clarified for many scholars the historic bases for ethnic complexity in the U.S. Southwest. 16. An excellent discussion of the various dimensions of this debate can be found in Mihesuah 1998. 17. http://www.nativeweb.org (accessed January 1, 2009). 18. See http://www.nativehawaiians.com (accessed January 1, 2009).

references Albó, Xavier. 1995. Our identity starting from pluralism in the base. In The postmodern debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna, 18–33. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Arias, Arturo, and Elizabeth Chin, eds. 2001. The Rigoberta Menchú controversy. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology. In Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus, 149–64. Berkeley: University of California Press. Behar, Ruth. 1993. Translated woman: Crossing the border with Esperanza’s story. Boston: Beacon. Bunker, Stephen G. 1988. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, unequal exchange, and the failure of the modern state. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butterworth, Douglas. 1980. People of Buena Ventura: Relocation of slum dwellers in postrevolutionary Cuba. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Casagrande, Joseph B. 1981. Strategies for survival: The Indians of highland Ecuador. In Cultural transformations and ethnicity in modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 260–77. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 325

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

Caulfield, Mina Davis. 1974. Culture and imperialism: Proposing a new dialectic. In Reinventing anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 182–212. New York: Vintage Books. Chun, Allen. 2001. From text to context: How anthropology makes its subjects. Cultural Anthropology 15 (4): 570–95. Clifford, James. 1983. On ethnographic authority. Representations 1 (2): 118–46. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 1998. American Indian intellectualism and the new Indian story. In Natives and academics: Researching and writing about American Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah, 111–38. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. Hermes’ dilemma: The masking of subversion in ethnographic description. In Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus, 51–76. Berkeley: University of California Press. Darnell, Regna. 1999. Translation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1–2): 251–54. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1998. Comfortable fictions and the struggle for turf: An essay review of The invented Indian: Cultural fictions and government policies. In Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Natives and academics: Researching and writing about American Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah, 65–83. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Field, Les. 2002. Blood and traits: Preliminary observations on the analysis of Mestizo and indigenous identities in Latin vs. North America. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 7 (1): 2–33. Fine, Kathleen S. 1988. The politics of “interpretation” at Mesa Verde National Park. Anthropological Quarterly 61 (4): 177–86. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave injustice: The American Indian repatriation movement and nagpra. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2005. Anthropological suspicion, public interest, and nagpra. Journal of Social Archaeology 5 (2): 171–91. ———. 2007. Más allá del folklore: La yumbada de Cotocollao como vitrina para los discursos de la identidad, de la intervención estatal, y del poder local en los Andes urbanos ecuatorianos. In Estudios ecuatorianos: Un aporte a la 326

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

discusión, vol. 2, Ponencias escogidas del III Encuentro de la Sección de Estudios Ecuatorianos lasa, ed. William F. Waters and Michael T. Hamerly, 55–72. Quito: flacso and Abya-Yala. Fried, Morton H. 1975. The notion of tribe. Menlo Park: Cummings. Geertz, Clifford. 1973 The interpretation of culture. New York: Basic Books. Gough, Kathleen. 1968. New proposals for anthropologists. Current Anthropology 9:403–7. Graham, Laura R. 1995. Performing dreams: Discourses of immortality among the Xavante of central Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Routledge. Hymes, Dell, ed. [1969] 1974. Reinventing anthropology. New York: Vintage Books. Judge, Jim, and Kathleen S. Fine-Dare. 1995. Anthropological frameworks for establishing cultural affiliation, final deport: A document to accompany the inventory of Native American human remains and associated funerary objects in the possession or control of Mesa Verde National Park. Prepared for Mesa Verde National Park and Research Management Division in partial fulfillment of contract #meve-r-94-0436. On file at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and the National Park Service, Washington dc. Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Kane, Joe. 1995. Savages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990. Crafting selves: Power, gender and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kulick, Don. 1995. Introduction: The sexual life of anthropologists; Erotic subjectivity and ethnographic work. In Taboo: Sex, identity and erotic subjectivity in anthropological fieldwork, ed. Don Kulick and Margaret Willson, 1–28. London: Routledge. Lathrap, Donald. 1970. The upper Amazon. London: Thames and Hudson. Leach, Edmund. 1973. Ourselves and others. Times Literary Supplement, July 6, 1973, 771–72. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1973. Tristes tropiques. Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin Books. 327

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1954. Modes of thought. In The institutions of primitive society, ed. E. E. Evans-Pritchard et al., 95–107. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Marcus, George. 1995. Ethnography of/in the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1): 95–113. Marcus, George, and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. 1998. Natives and academics: Researching and writing about American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Moore, Henrietta. 2004. Global anxieties: Concept-metaphors and pre-theoretical commitments in anthropology. Anthropological Theory 4 (1): 71–88. Murphy, Robert F. [1961] 1985. Defiance and social control I: What makes Waru run? In Native South Americans, ed. Patricia J. Lyon, 195–202. Prospect Heights il: Waveland. ———. 1971. The dialectics of social life. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1991. Anthropology at Columbia: A reminiscence. Dialectical Anthropology 16 (1): 65–81. Peacock, James L. 1998. Anthropology and the issues of our day. AnthroNotes 20 (1) (Spring): 1–5. Prieto, Mercedes. 2004. Liberalismo y temor: Imaginando los sujetos indígenas en Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

el Ecuador postcolonial, 1895–1950. Quito: flacso Sede Ecuador y Abya-Yala. Probyn, Elspeth. 1993. Sexing the self: Gendered positions in cultural studies. London: Routledge. Radin, Paul. 1963. The autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. New York: Dover. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 1994. The hyperreal Indian. Critique of Anthropology 14 (2): 153–72. Rappaport, Joanne. 1993. Cumbe reborn: An Andean ethnography of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. Intercultural utopias: Public intellectuals, cultural experimentation, and ethnic pluralism in Colombia. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Rosman, Abraham, and Paula Rubel. 2003. Translating cultures: Perspectives on translation and anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Rubenstein, Steven. 2001. Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian state. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (3): 263–93. 328

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

rubenstein and fine-dare

———. 2002. Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar healer in the margins of history. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 2005. La conversión del Shuar. Special issue, Íconos: Revista de Sciencias Sociales (the journal of flacso, Ecuador), no. 22 (April): 27–48. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. What is anthropological enlightenment? Some lessons of the twentieth century. Annual Review of Anthropology 28:i–xxiii. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Salomon, Frank L. 1980. Los señores étnicos de Quito el la época de los Incas. Colección Pendoneros, Serie: Etnohistoria 10. Otavalo, Ecuador: Instituto Otavaleño de Antropología. ———. 1981. Killing the Yumbo: A ritual drama of northern Quito. In Cultural transformations and ethnicity in modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 162–208. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1983. Shamanism and politics in late-colonial Ecuador. American Ethnologist 10 (3): 413–28. Schneider, David. 1968. American kinship: A cultural account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scholte, Bob. 1974. Toward a reflexive and critical anthropology. In Reinventing Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 430–57. New York: Vintage Books. Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of conquest: The impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the teaching machine. New York: Routledge. Starn, Orin. 1999. Nightwatch: The politics of protest in the Andes. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1992. The nervous system. New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1967. The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press. Whitten, Norman E., Jr. 1976. Ecuadorian ethnocide and indigenous ethnogenesis: 329

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

the lizard’s dream

Amazonian resurgence amidst Andean colonialism. International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs document 23. Copenhagen: iwgia. ———. 1981. Amazonia today at the base of the Andes: An ethnic interface in ecological, social, and ideological perspectives. In Cultural transformations and ethnicity in modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., 121–61. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Willis, William S., Jr. 1974. Skeletons in the anthropological closet. In Reinventing anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes, 121–52. New York: Vintage Books. Worsley, Peter. 1964. The third world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zuidema, R. Tom. 1990. Inca civilization in Cuzco. Austin: University of Texas

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Press.

330

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Afterword Fordism, Post-Fordism, and Americanist Anthropology

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

david l. nugent This compilation is a very interesting set of essays. Collectively, they have much to tell us about the novel forms of “Pan-American” border crossing—material, social, political, and cultural—that are leading anthropologists who work in the Americas to rethink and resite their research. Within the discipline, this resiting has come about because of the lingering importance of area studies, the framework in which most anthropologists have been trained since World War II—and from which the discipline now seeks to distance itself—although with much ambivalence. As Kathleen Fine-Dare (2003) reminded us during her presentation at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2003 (where many of the essays in this volume were first presented), “requests for specific areal specialization still anchor ads for academic employment.” In the world at large the forces that compel anthropologists to resituate their work revolve around what David Harvey (1989) calls the end of Fordism—and the emergence of more flexible regimes for the accumulation of capital, the movement of people, and the production of ideas. In other words, if there was a “Fordist” moment in Americanist anthropology—an area-studies framework associated with the post–World War II organization of the economy, cold war geopolitics, and the ability of “northern” universities to monopolize the representation of “others”—we now appear to have entered a more flexible, post-Fordist regime of power, economy, and knowledge. We also appear to be struggling

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

afterword

to accommodate and to reconcile the awarenesses that pertain to each of these two moments. The essays in this volume speak to this tension in very productive and interesting ways. In addition to placing the essays with respect to this historical watershed in the organization of material and cultural life—which has had a major impact on the conditions of knowledge production—in commenting on them I would like to draw on a problematic that Kathleen FineDare and Steven Rubenstein invoke in the introduction, and that Linda Seligmann echoes in her excellent essay. Fine-Dare and Rubenstein suggest that a new transnational Americanist anthropology should concern itself with the effects of inhumanity generated from within and beyond the Americas in creating new forms of hope, survival, advocacy, and resistance. Fine-Dare and Rubenstein’s ethical concerns are echoed by many of the contributors. Linda Seligmann (chap. 2), for example, appeals to us to make our work broadly relevant by reaching beyond the academy to appeal to multiple, nonacademic publics, to better understand how power works in people’s everyday lives (see also chap. 1, by John Norvell, and chap. 10, by Enrique Salmón). In other words, in rethinking and resiting their research, many of the contributors seek to use academic knowledge to pursue nonacademic goals that are ethical or applied in nature. This is a point to which I will return. In my commentary I will follow the lead of the contributors to ask the following questions. In what ways are the Pan-American border crossings of the post-Fordist era generating novel forms of association and understanding out of which emerge new forms of hope, survival, advocacy, and resistance? In what ways are we reaching out to multiple, nonacademic publics, as Linda Seligmann suggests we do? In what ways do the developments of recent decades represent the attempts of powerful bureaucracies and market structures to institutionalize values that are inimical to indigenous and subaltern groups (see Seligmann, chap. 2)? And finally to what extent is academia predisposed to recognize and reward our efforts to ground our work in these ethical concerns? I begin with James Zeidler’s contribution (chap. 3). This fascinating essay speaks to the tension between Fordist and post-Fordist moments 332

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

david l. nugent

in Americanist anthropology in unusually direct and insightful ways. Particularly important is Zeidler’s argument that the emergence of institutional/legal arenas that are not a part of the Fordist, university-based organization of knowledge—the set of processes surrounding nagpra and also cultural resource management—has helped break the monopoly on representation formerly enjoyed by the universities. Zeidler’s essay makes clear that in this case universities in the North—which have had a great deal of influence in training the archaeologists of the South—have played a predominately conservative role with respect to the production of knowledge. For the purposes of this volume, this argument is important in that it encourages us to view the history of our discipline not as a history of ideas but in relation to the material and institutional processes that act as the conditions of possibility for the elaboration of those ideas. Although it is implicit in many of the essays, this is an issue that the authors could explore in greater depth. Allow me to draw on my own experience to support Zeidler’s point. Several years ago I had the good fortune to work with an Indian tribe in the United States that was involved in a legal dispute with a consortium of mining companies. The collaborative research that we did and the collaborative document about tribal history that we produced played an important role in advancing the tribe’s efforts to win major concessions from the mining companies. Neither the research nor the writing, however, came out of a university-based, academic review process. Nor did our written work enter the academic arena for debate and evaluation by university-trained experts. Instead, research and writing were made possible by post-Fordist, federal legislation that emerged out of the indigenous-rights movement and also out of the environmental movement. As this example suggests, there are a great many more institutional processes involved in the production of anthropological knowledge now than during the heyday of Fordism, and a greater variety of arenas in which this knowledge is put to use. There are also many more constituencies that have a strong interest in the nature of that knowledge. As Zeidler’s essay suggests, mainstream academia seems ill-disposed to come to terms with these developments. 333

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

afterword

Les Field’s important essay (chap. 8) examines a cross-border network that has emerged out of the same kinds of political processes that James Zeidler discusses in his contribution: those that have helped generate a global, pan-indigenous movement in recent decades. Like Zeidler’s, Field’s essay speaks directly and eloquently to the limitations of Fordist anthropology to deal with the novel forms of association of the post-Fordist era. Field is particularly interested in the factors that have encouraged or retarded the development of a pan-indigenous movement: the globalization of both capitalism and indigenous concerns, on the one hand, and the ability of nation-states to police indigenous territories, communities, and bodies, on the other. Field focuses on three key dimensions of indigenous politics to illustrate the complex dynamics that obtain between indigenous people and the nation-states that seek to regulate them: struggles over language sovereignty, repatriation, and federal recognition. Regarding language, Field concludes that, although nation-states are not especially threatened by the exercise of indigenous language sovereignty, “even a partial accession to Native sovereignty and autorepresentation over language indicates a shift in power relations.” Furthermore, indigenous language revitalization programs have strengthened pan-indigenism, as indigenous groups from around the globe have borrowed from one another in mounting their particular struggles against the nation-states in which they are encapsulated. Field reaches somewhat different conclusions regarding repatriation, “a realm in which state sovereignty is not compromised, or only under very controlled circumstances and according to the rules set by nationstates. For that reason, . . . repatriation is an issue that can isolate indigenous groups from one another.” Field argues that recognition, on the other hand, has much greater potential to act as the basis of a global, pan-indigenous movement and suggests that indigenous groups in the United States that have achieved recognition could provide a model for groups elsewhere. To return to the broader themes of the book, in what ways does the panindigenous movement discussed in this essay help actualize new forms of hope and survival? In what ways is the movement still struggling to 334

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

david l. nugent

free itself from the limitations imposed by powerful governments and market structures? Without minimizing the importance of indigenous sovereignty over Native languages or the success of indigenous groups with regard to repatriation, Field is quite clear that neither represents a serious threat to the status quo. Neither, apparently, does recognition. Although recognition may have the potential to act as the basis of a broad, pan-indigenous movement, the severely limited nature of the sovereignty that it bestows on indigenous groups and the drastically substandard level of health, education, housing, and other services it provides mean that recognition has quite limited potential to disrupt the workings of powerful government bureaucracies or market structures (Biolsi 2001). Indeed, it is striking just how narrow is the space that recognition gives to indigenous groups to restructure their lives. The very fine essay by Barbara Burton and Sarah Gammage (chap. 7) offers a fascinating discussion of a different kind of post-Fordist network. Burton and Gammage focus on hometown associations (htas), crossborder socioeconomic networks that have emerged among Salvadoran immigrants to the Washington dc area. The authors do an excellent job of identifying the conditions out of which these associations have emerged: in El Salvador, a stagnating agricultural sector, civil conflict, and environmental disaster; in the United States, an extensive market for unskilled labor in the service and construction industries. Here we see the relevance of neoliberalism, the end of Fordism, and the legacy of U.S. foreign policy toward Central America. The authors do an equally good job of discussing the impact of htas on El Salvador. They emphasize how the collective remittances sent by the htas provide crucial funds that make possible important development projects. Burton and Gammage also provide a detailed account of the impact of htas on the immigrant community in Washington dc. The associations, the authors demonstrate, provide people with a wide range of key services that help them negotiate the problems involved in living and working in the dc area. The authors’ discussion makes clear that htas have been instrumental in creating social spaces that provide people with hope, that help them survive, and that advocate on their behalf. Clearly the authors 335

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

afterword

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

are also involved in activist research that goes beyond the academy to reach multiple publics. At the same time, however, it is striking that htas seem to focus very little of their energies on political activism. htas (and also individual remittances) promote adaptation, survival, and improvement. They appear to do so, however, within rather than beyond the established rules of the game. To what extent does this strategy contribute to the efforts of powerful bureaucracies and market structures to reproduce themselves (Seligmann’s question)? In this regard it is interesting that national governments in Central America are seeking to crowd into collective remittance programs like those sponsored by htas in order to facilitate investment in infrastructure and development projects. It is important to relate this to the downsizing of national governments and their retreat from providing even a minimum of basic services that characterize neoliberalism. It would appear, then, that governments in Central America view htas as partners in their efforts to manage national populations under conditions of structural adjustment. In the 1980s an influential cohort of scholars, writing at the precise moment that the material underpinnings of post–World War II social science were coming undone (Nugent 2008), began to look critically at key aspects of Fordist forms of producing knowledge and generating expertise. They did so by drawing attention to unproblematized assumptions about ethnographic authority and about the relations between culture, people, and place (see the introduction to this volume). Since that time their reflections and the sweeping changes in the organization of material life to which these authors were responding have provoked anthropologists to ask important new questions. These same transformations have confronted the discipline with diverse forms of border crossing that have proven highly productive (but also troubling) in conceptual terms. The present volume does an excellent job of capturing the intellectual fallout of anthropologists’ efforts to come to terms with this “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966). The instance of Shuar migrants from lowland Ecuador encountering ancestral Shuar heads at the American Museum 336

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

david l. nugent

of Natural History in New York City (as in the contribution by Steven Rubenstein, chap. 5) provides a fine example of anthropologists’ efforts to engage post-Fordist questions about the relations of culture, people, and place. So too does the phenomenon of South American mummies circulating throughout the Americas, provoking a wide range of responses from multiple publics (as in Kathleen Fine-Dare’s fascinating contribution, chap. 4). Latin American migrants to suburban New York City encountering entrenched boundaries of class in struggles over the public purse (in Jean Scandlyn’s excellent essay, chap. 6) raises a different but equally important set of concerns about the dynamics of post-Fordist border crossings. So too do the efforts of indigenous and nonindigenous Brazilians to form political alliances in ways that extend beyond the borders of culture (which Lêda Leitão Martins analyzes with exceptional skill in chap. 9). Not only the people we work among but also the people that we are reflect these broader transformations in the discipline and in the world, as seen in the dilemmas of a Rarámuri ethnobotanist doing cross-border research and advocacy (as discussed with great sensitivity and insight by Enrique Salmón, chap. 10), and in the efforts of a bordercrossing cultural and political geographer to understand emergent forms of identity and ethnicity associated with “globalization” (as in Peter McCormick’s thought-provoking essay, chap. 11). These contributions, and the book as a whole, point to the profound limitations of post–World War II conceptual categories, constructions of ethnographic authority, and assumptions about who belongs where. The book also speaks to the enormous epistemological, methodological, and ethical challenges involved in (once again) reinventing anthropology (Hymes 1972). To conclude, it is the great merit of this collection of essays to have drawn attention to novel forms of Pan-American association and understanding that have emerged in the post-Fordist era. These novel developments— themselves responses to and symptoms of sweeping transformations in global capitalism—have confronted anthropologists trained in the area-studies tradition with a series of dilemmas, some conceptual, others ethical/moral. One of the more interesting implications of the essays 337

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

afterword

collected in this volume is that to the extent that academia remains tied to Fordist concerns and Fordist institutional structures, it will remain illequipped to accommodate either the conceptual or the ethical dilemmas of the post-Fordist era. Tempting though it may be to do so, it would be a mistake to interpret the Fordist/post-Fordist trajectory as a linear narrative of academic progress, in which old, bad ideas are replaced by new, good ones. Another very interesting implication of this volume is that it is a mistake to view the history of the discipline in terms of a history of ideas. Rather, it is far more useful to examine the institutional processes that act as the conditions of possibility for distinct kinds of anthropology at particular historical moments. Examining the conditions of possibility of earlier work, we realize that there were pre-Fordist forms of producing scholarly expertise. Fine-Dare and Rubenstein discuss several in the introduction to this volume. Another pre-Fordist form of generating academic knowledge, now largely forgotten, emerged between World War I and World War II. At this time the great capitalist philanthropies (in particular Rockefeller and Carnegie) underwrote field-based research concerning the contested frontiers

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

and internal lines of fracture of an emergent global order and focused explicitly on applied concerns (Castañeda 2005; Nugent 2002). During and after World War II the Ford Foundation was instrumental in inscribing a new geography of knowledge, one we have come to know as area studies. In other words, there is a history to the way that global economic conditions, geopolitical concerns of hegemonic powers such as the United States, and the production of knowledge about these conditions develop. Straddling as they do two distinct periods in the organization of capitalism and two “moments” in the production of knowledge (Fordist and post-Fordist), the essays in this volume do an excellent job of drawing attention to this complex set of relationships. They also remind us of the enormous challenges faced by indigenous and subaltern groups who seek to challenge the structures of inequality out of which distinct “anthropologies” emerge. 338

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

david l. nugent

references Biolsi, Thomas. 2001. Deadliest enemies: Law and the making of race relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castañeda, Quetzil E. 2005. The Carnegie mission and vision of science: Institutional contexts of Maya archaeology and espionage. Histories of Anthropology Annual 1:37–74. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Praeger. Fine-Dare, Kathleen. 2003. Discussant comments: Americanist border crossings. Paper presented in the session “Moving Across Borders: Re-Thinking and Re-Siting Americanist Anthropology in an Era of nafta, alca, and a ‘War on Terrorism.’” American Anthropological Association annual meetings, Chicago, November. Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of culture change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hymes, Dell H., ed. 1972. Reinventing anthropology. New York: Pantheon. Nugent, David. 2002. Introduction. In Locating capitalism in time and space: Global restructurings, politics and identity, ed. D. Nugent, 1–59. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. Social science knowledge and military intelligence: Global conCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

flict, territorial control and the birth of area studies. Anuario Antropológico 2006 (Rio de Janeiro): 33–68.

339

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Contributors

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

barbara burton (PhD, Univerity of Texas, Austin) is employed as a practicing anthropologist in Toronto working on ethnographic projects pertaining to health care and aging in North America. Previously, she has worked as a consultant in Washington dc in the areas of migration, development, gender analysis, human rights, and trafficking in persons. She has taught anthropology at George Washington University and at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and continues to undertake independent community-based research and writing. les w. field is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He has worked with indigenous communities and movements in Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, and California. His first book, The Grimace of Macho Raton: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua, focused on the cultural politics of indigeneity during and after the Sandinista revolution. His second book, Abalone Tales, a broad analysis of contemporary and historical indigenous transformations in California, will be published by Duke University Press in 2008. Field’s next project will investigate attitudes and behaviors that contemporary Colombians display in their relationships with the pre-Columbian past. kathleen s. fine-dare (PhD, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is chair of the Department of Anthropology and a professor of anthropology and gender/women’s studies at Fort Lewis College in

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

contributors

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Durango, Colorado. She served as a Fulbright lecturer in 2005 for the ma program in anthropology and culture at the Salesian Polytechnic University in Quito, Ecuador. She is the author of Cotocollao: Ideología, Historia, y Acción en un Barrio de Quito (Abya-Yala Press, 1991) and Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and nagpra (University of Nebraska Press, 2002). She has published articles in Radical History Review and the Journal of Social Archaeology on the challenges and dilemmas posed to anthropology by the politics of repatriation in North America. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled “Urban Mountain Spirits: Struggles for and Uses of Indigeneity in Quito, Ecuador,” that examines the reemergence of the yumbada ritual performance in Cotocollao in light of the attempts of the descendants of former hacienda workers to assert and revitalize complex aspects of their heritage, including indigeneity. sarah gammage is an economist currently serving as social affairs officer for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Mexico City. She has also worked as the Washington dc representative of the Centro de Estudios Ambientales y Sociales para el Desarrollo Sostenible, a nongovernmental organization in El Salvador, and as an affiliate researcher with the Rutgers University Center for Women and Work. Her research includes examining the effects of macroeconomic policy and globalization on women in Latin America; exploring the impact of migration, internal displacement, and refugee status on the intergenerational transmission of poverty; and analyzing human-environment interactions in diverse ecosystems. Over the last ten years she has worked with and for a number of development organizations including the United Nations Development Programme, the International Center for Research on Women, and the International Institute for Environment and Development. She has a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a doctorate in development studies from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She is an active member of the Latin American Studies Association and the International Association for Feminist Economics. 342

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

contributors

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

lêda leitão martins is an assistant professor of anthropology at Pitzer College. She studied and worked in journalism in Brazil before receiving her PhD in anthropology at Cornell University. She conducts research nearly every year among the Macuxi, a Carib-speaking group that lives in the Brazilian Amazon near the border with Guiana. She has been involved with indigenous-rights advocacy in Brazil for nearly eighteen years. Martins has also written about ethical dilemmas, especially regarding the research conducted among the Yanomami. Martins was a key participant in the American Anthropological Association roundtable discussions on the Yanomami controversy and authored three articles in a book titled Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It (University of California Press, 2005). Her new research project focuses on natural-resource management and land uses among the Macuxi and other groups in Roraima. peter m c cormick (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an associate professor of Southwest studies and Native American and indigenous studies at Fort Lewis College. A cultural geographer by training, he works at the intersection of geography, anthropology, history, and literary studies. He is the author of numerous publications on the historical, political, and cultural geographies of the American Southwest and the southern plains. His most recent work has been on the autogeography and autohistory of his extended family in the plains, the Southwest, Appalachia, Iberia, South America, and the Mediterranean. john m. norvell is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College. In 2006 he received a Fulbright Faculty Scholar fellowship to work at the Federal University of Roraima in Boa Vista, Brazil, where he taught urban anthropology and began the first phase of a new research project on urban Indians and changing modes of ethnic and national identification in the state. His PhD from Cornell University was based on two years of ethnographic research conducted in the middle- and upperclass neighborhoods of the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. These findings are included in a work, tentatively titled “Brazilian White,” on whiteness 343

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

contributors

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

and racial categorization in Rio. Norvell also teaches and conducts research on the transnational spaces of the cybersphere. david l. nugent holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a professor of anthropology at Emory University. He has done field research in the eastern Canadian Arctic on Inuit subsistence patterns, in East Africa on government-sponsored sorcery eradication, in the Peruvian Andes on state formation and underground political movements, and in the western United States on indigenous land and water rights. His areas of specialization include political and economic anthropology; race, ethnicity and nationalism; Latin America; agrarian society; and the anthropology of the state. Nugent is the award-winning author and editor of several books, including Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885–1935 (Stanford University Press, 1997), Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity (Stanford University Press, 2001), and (with Joan Vincent) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Blackwell, 2004, a Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Title of 2004”). He has also published widely in journals on issues related to the political, economic, and historical anthropology of Latin America. Nugent has recently completed a book manuscript titled “Dark Fantasies of State: Discipline, Democracy, and Dissent in Northern Peru.” steven l. rubenstein holds the positions of reader in Latin American anthropology and director of the Research Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is author of Alejandro Tsakimp’: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) and has published articles in Cultural Anthropology, Signs, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. His current and prospective research projects explore the ongoing transformation of ethnic identity as Shuar participate in new economic and political arenas, with a focus on the intersection of gendered and ethnic identities; the ways indigenous identity and modernity are constructed through “community-based ecotourism”; and the involvement of Shuar Federation leaders in the national 344

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

contributors

indigenous movement and the plurinational political movement in Ecuador.

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

enrique salmón (rarámuri) is director of the American Indian studies program at California State University, East Bay. He has a bs from Western New Mexico University, an mat in southwestern studies from Colorado College, and a PhD in anthropology from Arizona State University. His dissertation was a study of how the bio-region of the Rarámuri people of the Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico, influences their language and thought, with a focus on poisonous plants used for medicine. His publication credits include sixteen articles, essays, reviews, and online articles on indigenous ethnobotany, traditional knowledge, and conceptual metaphors. He has been a scholar in residence at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; a trustee of the Society of Ethnobiology; and a program officer for the Christensen Fund, an independent private foundation that supports biocultural projects worldwide. Salmón serves on the board of directors of the Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association and is codirector of the Indigenous Peoples Restoration Network. He is also a founding member of the Traditional Cultures and Ecology section of the Ecological Society of America. jean n. scandlyn (ba, Middlebury College; bsn, Columbia University; msn, University of California at San Francisco; PhD, Columbia University) is a research faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, visiting faculty in anthropology at Colorado College, and a registered nurse. She is a cultural anthropologist with regional specialization in Latin America, the Caribbean, and contemporary North America. Her research interests include migration, medical anthropology, gender, and urban anthropology with a focus on social justice. Her dissertation, “When the Social Contract Fails: Intergenerational and Interethnic Conflict in an American Suburban School District,” examines ethnic, class, and intergenerational conflict over curriculum and funding for public education. She coedited the volume Women’s Health and Apartheid and has written on the social aspects of aids for nursing 345

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

contributors

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

and medical journals. Scandlyn currently serves as editor of the Applied Anthropologist, the journal of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology, and is collaborating on an ethnography studying the impact of militarization on families and community, both civilian and military, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. linda j. seligmann is a professor of anthropology and director of graduate studies of the anthropology program at George Mason University. She has also served as director of the Center for the Study of the Americas at George Mason, was a faculty fellow in the program in agrarian studies at Yale University, and associate director of the National Resource Center of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. She is a specialist in the Andean region of Latin America with research interests in agrarian issues, political economy, and the dynamics of gender, class, and ethnicity in the informal economy. Her current research is on transnational and transracial adoption and changing assumptions about American families. Her publications include a special issue of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, “The Cultural and Political Economics of Adoption in Latin America” (coedited with Jessaca Leinaweaver, April 2009); Peruvian Street Lives: Culture, Power, and Economy among Market Women of Cuzco (University of Illinois Press, 2004); an edited volume, Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares (Stanford University Press, 2001); and Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969–1991 (Stanford University Press, 1995), as well as articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, and Ethnohistory. james a. zeidler is a senior research scientist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, where he serves as associate director for cultural resources in the Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands. He also holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the csu Department of Anthropology, where he teaches a course on heritage resource management. He is a registered professional archaeologist with 346

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

contributors

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

thirty-four years of experience as a practicing prehistoric archaeologist. He has extensive field experience in both North and South America. He received his PhD in anthropology (1984) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he specialized in archaeology and South American prehistory under the late Donald W. Lathrap. He has taught archaeology at the university level in both Ecuador and the United States and has conducted archaeological field research in Ecuador and Colombia. Zeidler has published extensively on his Ecuadorian field research, with special emphasis on pre-Hispanic settlement dynamics, community organization, and cosmology, as well as the impact of Holocene volcanism on these societies. Special areas of focus have been the Valdivia, Chorrera, and Jama-Coaque cultures of coastal Ecuador, and he maintains ongoing archaeological and ethnohistorical research on the prehistory and colonial history of northern Manabí Province. He was a founding faculty member (in 1980) of the Centro de Estudios Arqueológicos y Antropológicos of Ecuador’s Coastal Polytechnic University in Guayaquil and continues his long-term association with Ecuadorian and other Latin American colleagues.

347

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustra-

Alaska, 101

tions.

Albert, Bruce, 256, 257

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Albó, Xavier, 320 abertura, 6, 24n4

Alejandro Tsakimp (Rubenstein), 313–14

Abya Yala Fund, 83

Alland, Alex, Jr., 300

Achuar (indigenous group): human

Allen, James, 84

remains of, 126, 127, 129, 143,

All Roads Are Good exhibition, 127

153n5, 154nn9–10; relationship of, to

Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 68, 88

Shuar, 143, 157n17, 163n28. See also

Als, Hilton, 84

Federacíon Interprovincial de Cen-

Altamira meeting (1988), 251

tros Shuar-Achuar

Alvarez, Robert, xvi

Ackerman, Douglas, 124–25

Amarillo tx, 276

Adams Morgan neighborhood (Wash-

Amazon, xxivn1, 130–34, 139, 247–48,

ington dc), 218 affirmative action, 3–4, 16–17, 19, 21–22, 26n19

253, 256–57, 257n2, 258n3 American Anthropological Association (aaa), 268, 289–90, 321, 331

Africa, 201, 230

American Anthropologist, 40, 103

African Americans, xiii, 21, 84, 185,

American Antiquity, xv

293–95. See also black movements African slaves, 12, 15 “aging in place,” 189–90 Ahayu:da, 123, 125, 127, 237, 239 Akaka Bill. See Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act Akwesasne Freedom School, 236

American Archaeological Committee, xxvn3 American Indian Movement (aim), 81–83 American Indians: and anthropological research and teaching, xii, xiii, 302– 4, 315–21, 325n15, 333; in Appalachia,

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

American Indians (cont.) 275–76; emotional responses of, to

290–96, 307; political commentary

loss, 97–98; identity of, 100–103;

in, 271; teaching of, 315–18; training

languages of, 233–36; and museum

in, 331–38; U.S. government use of,

exhibits, 81–83; and repatriation leg-

324nn10–11

islation, 127. See also specific groups Americanist studies: careers in, 292;

Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Fischer), 301

characteristics of, ix–xi, 295–96,

Anthropology News, 39

318–22; development of, xi–xiii; re-

Appadurai, Arjun, 80, 120–21, 130, 145,

gional and comparative, xv–xvii, 319 American Museum of Natural History

147, 148, 214; Modernity at Large, 231 Appalachia, 275–76, 286n1

(amnh), 120, 134–38, 141–43, 146–

Arawak (indigenous group), 257n1

48, 158n20, 159nn21–22, 163n27,

Archabal, Nina, 159n22

336–37

archaeology: Americanist definition of,

American Society of France, xxvn3

43–44; and anthropological hege-

American Sociological Association,

mony, 51, 53; on cultural boundaries,

38–39

151n2; and heritage, 50–57, 52, 302;

“Americas” (concept-metaphor), xviii

and human remains, 75, 91–92; and

Ames, Michael, 159n22

“other,” 44, 45, 46–50; and repatria-

Anderson, Lisa: “The Global Reach of American Social Science,” 37–38 Andes: anthropological research in, 292–96, 317, 323n6; body prospectCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

135–36, 158n20; nature of work in,

ing in, 87–90; indigenous identity in, 251; mummy sites in, 75, 86–87;

tion movement, 124; training in, 333 Archeological Resources Protection Act (arpa) (1979), 153n7 area studies, xvii, 37, 212, 231, 331, 337, 338 Argentina: archaeology in, 49; com-

repatriations to, 70–83; responses to

parison of, with Dust Bowl, 281–84;

bodies from, 73–74, 81–83

description of, in 1930s, 277–78;

Andrews, Roy Chapman, 84

economic problems of, 277–80; eco-

anthropology: body-based, 85–87; and

nomic recovery in, 280–81; in global

borders, 264; comparative work

society, 284; indigenous identity in,

in, 231; “crisis of representation”

89; mummies in, 75–80, 86–87;

in, x, 300, 301, 303, 308–15; dual

recognition of indigenous peoples

perspectives of, 296–98; empiri-

in, 90, 106n10; repatriation policy

cism in, 39–40, 299; field methods

in, 90–92, 100, 111n28

in, 294–95, 323n6; hegemony of,

“Argentinazo,” 280, 281

35–41, 51, 53; “lost treasures” of,

Arizona, 263–65

350

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Arlington va, 215 Asad, Talal, 309 Ashworth, G. J., 52–53, 54 Asociación Indígena de la República Argentina (aira), 78, 106n10

Blackness without Ethnicity (Sansone), 21 Boas, Franz: and Americanist studies, xiii–xiv; at Columbia University, 299, 324n10; on cultural boundar-

assimilation, 239, 278

ies, 122, 150n1, 152n3, 160n22;

Atlantic Ocean, 280

Gilberto Freyre with, 5; and racialist

Auckland War Museum, 235

studies, 23n1; theoretical stance of,

Australia, 90, 100, 231, 235, 242–43

299, 305; on translation, 308

Autobiography of a Winnebago (Radin), 316

Body World exhibits, 73 Bolivia, 232, 243, 280 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 26n20

Baez, Uxtacio, 111n30

Borderland (Stilgoe), 172

Bal, Mieke, 134

Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 18–20; “On the

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

BanComercio, 218

Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” 18

Barrymore, John, 83–84

“The Boy” (preserved person), 76

Barth, Fredrik, 40–41

Brant, Joseph, 247

Bashkow, Ira, 121

Brasília, 257n2

Baumgartner, M. P., 191

Bray, Tamara, 46, 50, 56

Becker, Marc, 318

Brazil: anthropological research in, xiii,

Behar, Ruth, 308, 314

4–6, 292, 316; indigenous alliances

Belgrano district (Buenos Aires), 277

in, 248–57, 257n2, 337; nongovern-

Bell Helicopter Textron, 298

mental organizations in, 16, 249;

Belote, Jim, 322n3

racial categorization in, 4, 5, 14,

Benavides, O. Hugo, 49, 55

19–20, 23n3; racial discrimination

Benjamin, Walter, 310

laws in, 3–4, 16–17, 19, 21–22, 24n9,

Berkeley ca, 285

25n18; racial existence in, 11–15;

Bernal, Ignacio, xiii

racial experience in, 8–11; racial

Bhabha, Homi, 287n8

persistence in, 15–17; raciological

Biestman, Karen, 238

polemics in, 17–23; recognition of

Big Foot (Miniconjou), 68

indigenous peoples in, 243; social

BioMaterial, Inc., 88

class in, 4–5, 12–15, 17, 255

Birket-Smith, Kaj, xiii

Brazil Ministry of Justice, 16

Black Irish, 276, 278

“break throughs,” 192, 206n19

black movements, 6, 18, 21, 26n19,

Breton Woods Accord (1973), xi

27n20. See also African Americans

British immigrants, 275, 278 351

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Brubaker, Rogers, 24n8

Casagrande, Joseph, 292, 322n3

Buenos Aires, 110n28, 277–79, 281,

casino industry, 242

283–84

Cassells, Monica, 76

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 107n14

Castro, Francisco, 221

Bunker, Stephen G., 292

Catholic Church, 253, 255, 294, 307, 317

Bunzl, Matti, 121–22

Cayuqueo, Nilo, 83

Burdick, John, 20

Celtic Europe, 230

Bureau of American Ethnology, xiii

Central America, 215, 282, 335–36

Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia), 242

Central Bank of Ecuador, 93

Burgos, Hugo, 323n3

Ceremony (Silko), 95

Buroway, Michael: “Public Sociologies,”

Chase-Dunn, Christopher, 151n2,

38–39

163n30

Burton, Barbara, 335–36

Cherokee (indigenous group), 69, 244

Butler, Nicholas Murray, 299

Cherokee Strip, 276

Butterworth, Douglas, 292

Chicano writers, 95 Chickasaw (indigenous group), 248

caboclos. See Macuxi (indigenous group)

Chihuahua, Mexico, 263–64

Cajete, Gregory, 266

Chile, 75, 243

California, 206n16, 231, 233, 235, 237,

Chippewa (indigenous group), 292

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

240–45

Choctaw (indigenous group), 236, 248

Canada, 68, 79–80, 235

Chronicle of Higher Education, 38

Candoshi (indigenous group), 154n9

citizenship, fantastic, 220–24

capacocha, 77

Civilized Tribes, 275–76

capitalism: and archaeology, 51–52;

clan system, 269, 270

globalization of, 120–21, 131, 137–41, 145, 148, 159n22, 160n24, 231, 232, 244, 248, 287n8, 334, 337, 338; and human remains, 88–89, 110n27;

Clark, Leonard, 132–33, 136, 139, 140, 161n24 Clifford, James, 80, 152n3, 301, 308, 324n14

and indigenous identity, 80–83. See

Clinton, Bill, 241

also economy

Cobb, Jonathan: The Hidden Injuries of

Caribbean Race Relations (Hoetink), 3

Class, 176

Caribbean studies, xi

Collier, Donald, 322n2

Carnegie Institution, xiii, 338

Colombia, xiii, 48, 49, 231, 234, 235

Carneiro, Edison, 5

colonialism: and anthropological re-

Carneiro, Robert, 134

search, 291, 292, 297, 300; and

Carter, Jimmy, 291, 298

global indigenous movement, 231,

352

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

239, 241, 247–48; and global society, 285, 287n8; in Latin America, 279,

genas da Amazonia Brasileira, 248,

280, 306, 307, 312; and race, 12

252, 257n2

Colorado, 277, 302, 303

Coordinator of the Indigenous Orga-

Colorado Plateau, 269, 270

nizations of the Amazon Basin. See

color terms, 9, 11, 13, 21, 24n11. See also

Coordenação das Organizações In-

skin color Columbia University, 5, 296, 299–301, 303–4, 319, 324nn11–12 Comanche (indigenous group), 292 Comité de Solidaridad Monseñor Romero, 222 Comité Pro Mejoramiento El Chiquirín, 215–16, 223

dígenas da Amazonia Brasileira côr, 11, 13. See also skin color corn, 269 Corpus Christi (religious observance), 294 Cotocollao (Quito), 294, 303, 304 Crandon, Libbet, 298 Crapanzano, Vincent, x, 309

Comité Tejar, 211–12, 220

Creek (indigenous group), 248

Committee to Improve the City of El

Crespi, Muriel, 323n3

Chiquirín. See Comité Pro Mejora-

critical science, 48, 50, 55, 56

miento El Chiquirín

Cruwys, Elizabeth, 156n14

community: ethics of, 267–71; stud-

Cruz, Blanca, 223

ies of, 174, 175, 177–84, 200–203,

Cuba, 187, 292

203n3, 204n5, 204nn7–8, 205n9,

Cuenca, Ecuador, 307

221, 232, 334. See also family

cultural boundaries: Franz Boas on,

Confederación de Nacionalidades IndíCopyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Coordenação das Organizações Indí-

genas del Ecuador (conaie), 49, 93 Conformity and Conflict (Spradley and McCurdy), 4 Conklin, Beth, 40; “Speaking Truth to Power,” 39 Consejo de Acontecimientos Aborígenes de Argentina (caa), 111n30 Conselho de Articulação dos Povos e

122, 150n1, 152n3, 160n22; and globalization, 120–23, 130, 149n1, 151n2; and headhunting, 128; and Shuar, 119–23; in suburbs, 172 cultural objects, 70–83, 126, 154n9, 239–40, 304 cultural resource management (crm) archaeology, 44, 46–47, 49, 333 culture: in Argentina and Dust Bowl,

Organizações Indígenas do Brasil

275–76, 278–80, 282, 283, 285–86;

(capoib), 257n2

and Brazilian indigenous politics,

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 103, 319–20

249–57; as concept-metaphor,

Cooper, Frederick, 24n8

xxvin8; and global indigenous

Cooper, Susan, 172

movement, 232, 239, 244; of Hopi 353

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

culture (cont.) land management, 270; hybridity

Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 81

of, 287n8; and kinship, 264, 265; in

Duncan, James S., 173, 199, 205n9

museum exhibitions, 160n22, 336–

Duncan, Nancy G., 173, 199, 205n9

37; and race in Brazil, 21; represen-

Durango co, 303

tation of, 309; in suburbs, 173–74,

Durkheim, Émile, 24n6, 324n14

177, 201, 203n3, 204n4

Dust Bowl: comparison of, with Argen-

Cunha, Olívia Gomes da, 5

tina, 281–84; economic transforma-

The Cunning of Reason (Povinelli), 100

tion of, 281–84; ethnicity in, 275–76;

Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria), 103

geography of, 274, 276–77, 282

Cuzco, Peru, 75 Echo-Hawk, Roger, 47 Dances with Wolves, 101 Darnell, Regina, 44, 308; Invisible Genealogies, 46

331; in Andean region, 251; in Argentina and Dust Bowl, 277–84; and

death, 98, 99

global indigenous movement, 231;

Deloria, Vine, Jr., x, 323n5; Custer Died

and immigration, 186–87, 213–15;

for Your Sins, 103

and indigenous political move-

Dembicz, Andrzej, xiv

ments, 253–55; and repatriation

DeNardo, Juan Bautista, 277

movement, 99–100; of Shuar, 306,

Denmark, 236–38

307. See also capitalism

Derrida, Jacques, 298 Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

economy: in Americanist anthropology,

Ecuador: anthropological research in,

Descola, Philippe, 129, 154n9

290, 292–96, 302, 304–9, 311–15,

Devereux, Georges, 319

317–18, 321, 322n3; archaeology in,

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in

44, 48–50, 55, 57; and global capitalist

South America (Taussig), 110n27,

economy, 138–41; and global indig-

297–98

enous movement, 232, 234, 235, 243;

The Dialectics of Social Life (Murphy), 298–99 Dirlik, Arif, xi, 95 Discovery Channel, 89 Dodge City ks, 276

immigrants from, 188; indigenous identity in, 231; missionaries in, 144; repatriation movement in, 72, 93 Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, 243

Dombrowski, Kirk, 101

El Dorado (ancient city), 133, 139

Dominguez, Maria, 187

Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 85

Dominican immigrants, 187

Elites (Lizaur), 40

Donnan, Hastings, xvi

Elizabeth nj, 189

354

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

El Salvador, 215–16, 218–20, 223, 224, 335, 336. See also Salvadoran im-

Shuar, 119, 126, 128, 153n5, 154n10,

migrants

313–14, 318, 321. See also Shuar (in-

English as a second language (esl), 195–97 environmental movements, 248, 252, 333 Erickson, Clark, 292 Espíritu Santo, Brazil, 18 essentialism, 68–69, 73, 74, 95–97, 102, 283, 294, 303 ethics, 38–40, 123, 267–71, 318, 332, 337–38 ethnicity: in Argentina and Dust Bowl, 275–76, 278–79, 282, 283; of Brazilians, 255, 256; concept of, 8; in

digenous group) Federacíon Interprovincial de Centros Shuar-Achuar, 123, 125–26, 153n5. See also Achuar (indigenous group); Shuar (indigenous group) Federal Acknowledgment Process (fap), 242 Federal Register, 104n1 Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 17 Ferguson, James, 121–22, 201 Field, Les, 69, 95, 124, 320–21, 334–35 Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), 322n2

global society, 285, 337; of Native

Fine-Dare, Kathleen: on Americanist

ethnographers, 264; in suburbs,

anthropology, 332; book project of,

172, 175–76, 201, 206n23

289–90, 331; career history of, 291–

ethnography: and anthropological

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Federacíon Interprovincial de Centros

96, 299, 302–4, 315–22; and cul-

hegemony, 34–37, 38, 213–14, 336,

tural resource management archae-

337; of Brazil, 20, 256; at Columbia

ology, 46; on knowledge production,

University, 300; comparative, 152n3,

338; on scope of research, 50

231–33; cosmopolitan, 145; “crisis of

First Nations people, 80

representation” in, x, 308–15; ethics

Fischer, Michael M. J., 308, 324n14;

of, 267–69; as literary genre, 301;

Anthropology as Cultural Critique,

by Natives, 263–72, 337; reflexive

301

approach to, 290–91; of Shuar,

Fish, Jeffrey, 4, 8

143–44, 163n28, 307

Fletcher, Alice, xii

ethnoscapes, 120–21, 130, 141–48

Florida, 81–83 Florida International Museum (St. Pe-

Fadiman, Anne, 203 family, 216–20, 263–66, 271. See also community; kinship Farabundo Martí para la Liberation National (fmln), 222, 225n10

tersburg), 81–83 Folha de São Paulo, 25n17 Folklife Festival, 127 Ford Foundation, xvii, 16, 19, 338 Fort Lewis College, 304 355

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Foucault, Michel, 16, 25n16, 99, 298, 300

globalization: in anthropological research, 310, 318–22, 334–38; and

France, xii, xxvn3, 130, 275

archaeology, 47, 50–52, 52; in Argen-

Frazier, Franklin, 5

tina and Dust Bowl, 278, 281–85;

Free Trade Agreement of the Americas,

concept of, xviii; core and periph-

253

ery model of, 120–23, 130, 131,

French, John, 18, 20

135, 137–41, 145–48, 149n1, 151n2,

Freud, Sigmund: “Mourning and Mel-

152n3, 159n22, 160n24, 163n30;

ancholia,” 97

and cultural hybridity, 287n8; and

Frey, Peter, 17, 18

geography, 283–86, 337; and indig-

Freyre, Gilberto, 5

enous identity, 80–83; and suburbs,

Fried, Morton, 296–97, 300, 305,

184, 185. See also global indigenous

324n12; The Notion of Tribe, 297 Friedman, Jonathan, 145–48 Fry, Peter, 4 Fulbrook, Mary, 57; Historical Theory, 56

movement; transnationalism “The Global Reach of American Social Science” (Anderson), 37–38 Gnecco, Cristobal, 49 Goldberg, David, 5 Goldring, Luin, 218

Gamio, Manuel, 92

Goldstein, Donna, 20

Gammage, Sarah, 335–36

Gow, Peter, 123

Gans, Herbert: The Levittowners, 174,

Graham, Laura: Performing Dreams, 316

192, 204n4 Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Garden City ks, 282

Great Britain, 280, 297. See also British immigrants

Geertz, Clifford, 7–8, 323n7

Great Depression, 278

Germani, Alfredo, 144

Green, Diane, 194

Ghost Dance, 67–68, 102–3, 248

Greenland, 236–37

Gigante Express, 218

Grimes, William, 159nn20–21

Gilroy, Paul, 24n7

Guanuco, Rogelio, 78

Gledhill, John, xxiv

Guatemala, xiii, 222, 232, 234, 235,

global indigenous movement: alliances in, 247–49; description of, 230–33; and language, 233–36, 239, 244,

292, 298 Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo, 5, 17

245; and recognition, 240–45; and

Gujarat, India, 222

repatriation, 233, 236–40, 245; study

Gupta, Akhil, 121–22, 201

of, 256–57, 334–35. See also global-

Guyer, Jane I., xvi

ization; transnationalism

Guymon ok, 276–77, 282

356

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Hagens, Gunther von, 104n2

235, 239–41, 243, 248; and heritage,

Halbwachs, Maurice, 162n26

52, 56; and memory, 141, 162n26; of

Hale, Charles, 68–70

suburbs, 179, 205n9

Hall, Thomas, 151n2, 163n30 Hanchard, Michael: Orpheus and Power, 6, 18–19 Handler, Richard, xxvin8

(Sabloff), 43 Hodder, Ian, 51, 52 Hoetink, Harry: Caribbean Race Rela-

Harkin, Michael, 98

tions, 3; Slavery and Race Relations in

Harner, Michael, 129, 154n9; Jívaro,

the Americas, 3

144 Harris, Marvin, 9, 296, 300, 301; Patterns of Race in the Americas, 3

Homestead Act, 277 hometown associations (htas), 211–12, 215–16, 220–24, 335–36

Harvey, David, 137, 331

Honduras, 222

Harvey, Fred, 325n15

Hopi (indigenous group), 93–94, 263–

Hawaiian Natives, 127, 235, 236, 240–41

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

A History of American Archaeology

66, 269–71 Howe, Craig, 235

headhunting, 128, 132, 154n9

Hughes’ Tool, 298

Hearst Museum, 237–38

human remains: circulation of, 83–89;

Henderson, Matt, 190

collection management of, 304; as

Hendricks, Janet Wall, 154n9

cultural objects, 126, 154n9; emo-

heritage, 50–57, 52, 53, 55

tional responses to, 98–102; and

hermeneutics, x, xxivn1

indigenous rights, 90–97, 105n9,

Hernández, Esperanza: Translated

111n28, 237, 334; prospecting of,

Woman, 308 Herskovits, Melville, 5

87–90; reburial of, 104n1. See also mummies; tsantsas

Hertzberg, Hazel, 248

Hurricane Mitch, 215

Heye Foundation, 152n4, 155n11

hybridism, 95, 102–3, 213, 276, 278–79,

Heyman, Josiah, xvi The Hidden Injuries of Class (Cobb), 176 Higham, John, 175

283, 287n8, 296 Hymes, Dell: Reinventing Anthropology, 301

Higueras, Alvaro, 91 Hispanic students, 302, 303, 315

The Ice Maiden (Reinhard), 109n25

Historical Theory (Fulbrook), 56

identity: in anthropological research

history: in anthropological research,

and teaching, 293–95, 302–4,

293, 299, 338; and ethics, 267; and

315–17, 320–21; of anthropologists,

global indigenous movement, 232,

34–41; in global society, 275, 283–85, 357

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

identity (cont.) 337; and heritage, 50–57; of immi-

Information, 93

grants, 202–3, 244; of indigenous

Information Network of Sovereign Peo-

peoples, 68–73, 80–83, 88–90, 92–

ples/Okanagan Nation, Canada, 94

93, 95–96, 100–103, 231–33, 243,

“Inka challenge,” 81

244, 247–48, 251, 254–56, 268, 270,

Inkarrí, story of, 67

334–35; of Native ethnographers,

Institute for Defense Analyses, 324n11

263–66, 270–72; and race, 24n8,

International Congress of Americanists

254; and transnationalism, 213, 214 ignorance, 41 immigrants: associations of, 211–12, 215–16, 220–24, 335–36; factions of, 193; identities of, 202–3, 244; and indigenous political movements, 254; old vs. new, 185–88, 198; social class of, 198–200; in suburban population, 174–77, 181–84, 204n5, 204n7; in Washington dc, 214–16. See also migration; specific countries and groups Inakayal (Pehuenche/Tehuelche), 90, 110n28, 111n30 Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

individualism, 199, 268

(ica), xii–xv, xxvin6 International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, 319 International Inter-Tribal Treaty Council, 230 International Labour Organization convention 169, 81 International Monetary Fund (imf), 279 International School of Archaeology and Ethnology, xiii Inuit (indigenous group), 236–37, 252 Invisible Genealogies (Darnell), 46 “The Invisible Man” (Krebs), 36

Inca (indigenous group), 67, 75–81

Irish immigrants, 185, 278

India, 222, 230

Iroquois (indigenous group), 252

Indian Reform Act (1934), 242

Ishi (Yahi), 238

Indigenous Council of Roraima, 253, 257

Isleta Pueblo, 233

indigenous peoples: anthropological

Italian immigrants, 185, 186, 278

study of, x, 39–40; archaeological study of, 43–57; international move-

Jackson, Kenneth, 172, 181

ment of, 55, 57n2; recognition of,

Jameson, Fredric, 137

90, 106n10, 233, 240–45, 334–35;

Japan, 230

sovereignty and representation of,

Jennings, Jesse D., 46

231, 232, 235, 236, 238, 240–43, 284,

Jews, 275, 276, 286n1

334, 335. See also specific groups

Jíntiach’, Silverio, 312

Indigenous Policy and Support to In-

Jívaro (Harner), 144

digenous Communities law, 90

Jívaro (indigenous group), 84, 132–34,

358

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

154. See also Shuar (indigenous group)

266–67

Johnson, Mark, xviii

Kondo, Dorinne, 291

Journal of Comparative American Stud-

Kowalewski, Stephen, 151n2, 163n30

ies, xvi Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 320–21

Krebs, Edgar-do, 37; “The Invisible Man,” 36 Kroeber, Alfred, xiii, 238, 285

Juank, Aíjiu. See Germani, Alfredo

Kulick, Don, 291

kachinas, 270

LaBarre, Weston, 319

kakáram, 157n16

labor unions, 222, 225n10, 253

Kane, Joe: Savages, 317–18

La Condamine, Charles de, 130–31

Kansas, 276–77, 281, 282

Lakota language, 235

Kayapó (indigenous group), 249,

Lamphere, Louise: Structuring Diversity,

251–53

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

of, 36–37, 100; transmission of,

204n7

Kearney, Michael, xvi

La Nación, 76

Kehoe, Alice, 68

Landes, Ruth, 5

Kelekna, Pita, 154n9

language: in anthropological research,

Kelly, Linda, 195

293, 309, 320; English as second,

Kennewick Man, case of, 47, 124

195–97; and global indigenous

Keres language, 235

movement, 233–36, 239, 244, 245,

kharisiri, 87

334, 335; of Hopi and Rarámuri,

King, Mary, 172–73

264–65; and indigenous identity, 96

King, Thomas F., 57n1

Las Chinamecas, 215

kinship: and culture, 264, 265; of

“late liberalism,” 100

Hopi, 263–66, 271; in Mexico,

Lathrap, Donald W., 46, 322n2

263–65; of Rarámuri, 263–66, 271;

Latin America: archaeology in, 44, 46,

responsibilities of, 268; of Seri,

48–57; economic problems in, 279–

263–66, 271; of Shuar, 312, 313, 314.

80; human remains in, 75; immi-

See also family

grants from, 174, 182–84, 186–89,

Klumpp, Kathy, 322n3

195–98, 202, 206n21, 244–45, 282;

knowledge: and ethics, 268–70, 318;

indigenous identity in, 69–70, 83,

and indigenous identity, 96; nature

95, 96, 231, 247; indigenous politi-

of anthropological, 290; politics

cal movements in, 251, 255–56; in-

of production of, 80–83, 99–103,

digenous rights in, 94, 248; looting

298, 331–33, 336, 338; reciprocity

in, 86, 109n22; Marxism in, 293; 359

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Latin America (cont.) race in, 8, 12; recognition of indig-

magical realism, 319–20

enous peoples in, 243; repatriation

Mahler, Sarah, 213

movement in, 72, 92–93, 96

“The Maiden” (preserved person), 76

Latin American Antiquity, xv

Malinowski, Bronislaw, 122, 136, 152n3

Latin American studies, xi, xiv–xv, 35,

Maori (indigenous group), 231, 235,

292, 295, 298, 319–21, 325n15

238, 239, 241

Latin American Studies Association, 93

Mar, José Matos, xiii

Latour, Bruno, x, 146

Marcus, George, 308, 324n14; Writing

La Unión, El Salvador, 215, 224 Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native” (Medicine), 103 León, Rene, 216 Lesser, Alexander, xiii, 120

Culture, 301 Masayesva, Victor, 93–94 Massachusetts Historical Society, xii materialism, 296–98, 301, 307, 323n8, 336

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 136, 323n7

Mato Grosso, Brazil, 276

Levitt, Peggy, 217

McCallum, Cecila, 20

The Levittowners (Gans), 174, 192,

McCormick, Peter, 289

204n4 Lewis, Oscar, 292 liberalism, 100, 267–68, 335, 336

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Maggie, Yvonne, 17

McCormick, Rossalene, 276–79, 283 McCurdy, David W.: Conformity and Conflict, 4

Lienhardt, Godfrey, 309

McGuire, Randall H., 163n30

“Lightning Girl” (preserved person), 76

McKeown, Timothy, 78–80, 90, 100

Litwack, Leon, 84

Medicine, Beatrice: Learning to Be an

Lizaur, Marisol Pérez: Elites, 40

Anthropologist and Remaining “Na-

Llullaillaco children, 74–80, 86, 105n9,

tive,” 103

111n28, 111n30 Lobar, Steven, 160n22

Melungeon (ethnic group), 276, 278, 286n1

locality, 214

memory, 141, 162n26, 269

Locke, John, xi–xii

Menchú, Rigoberta, 320

Lomnitz, Larissa, 40

Menem, Carlos Saúl, 279 Mengatohue, Moi, 317–18

Macas, Ecuador, 311

Mesa Verde National Park, 304

MacCannell, Dean, 163n29

mestizaje, 69–70, 72

MacDonald, Theodore, 57

“metamuseums,” 134, 135

Macuxi (indigenous group), 249–57,

Mexico: and anthropological research,

257n1

xiii, 40, 292; immigrants from, 282;

360

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

indigenous languages in, 235, 244;

mulatas, 9

kinship relationships in, 263–65;

mummies: definition of, 75; “ice,” 81–

recognition of indigenous peoples

82, 107n14; of Llullaillaco children,

in, 243–44; repatriation movement

74–80, 86, 105n9, 111n28, 111n30;

in, 92; Shuar in, 139–40

repatriation movement for, 70–83,

Miami (indigenous group), 233

91, 92; responses to display of,

Miantonomo (Narragansett), 247, 253

73–74, 80–83, 337; scientific analy-

Middlemarch (Eliot), 85

ses of, 85–87

migration: anthropological research on, 292, 336–37; in Argentina, 278;

The Dialectics of Social Life, 298–99

attitudes toward, 223; characteristics

Murra, John, 292

of transnational, 138–41, 160n24,

Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña

212–14; to Dust Bowl, 275, 282; as survival strategy, 218. See also immigrants Miremont, Gabriel, 77–80, 92 Mississippi, 236 Mitchell, Michael, 24n4 Mitchell, Timothy, 148 Mixtec (indigenous group), 244 Modernity at Large (Appadurai), 231 Mohawk language, 236 Mohegan family, 180, 205n11 Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Murphy, Robert, 290, 298, 305, 323n8;

Monroe Doctrine, 280 Monserrat, 281 Mooney, James, 68

(maam), 75–80, 83, 86, 91 Museum of High Altitude Archaeology of Salta. See Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (maam) Museum of La Plata, 110n28 museums: consumers in, 134–38; functions of, 137, 159n22; and repatriation movement, 70–71, 91, 92, 98, 123–24, 236–40. See also specific museums Muslim Moors, 275, 286n1 Muwekma Ohlone (indigenous group), 240–41, 242

Moore, Henrietta, xviii morality. See ethics

Nader, Laura, 177

morena, 4

Nancy, France, xii

Morgan, Lewis Henry, 149n1

ñaqaq, 87

Morona Santiago Province, Ecuador,

Nascimento, Abdias do, 6

153n5, 305, 311–12 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 280 Mount Kisco ny, 199 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 97

The Nation, 324n10 National Geographic, 76, 79, 80, 87, 89, 109n25 National Museum of Natural History, 134 361

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

National Museum of the American Indian (nmai): collection of, 152n4,

New Bedford ny, 199

155n11; Don Nazario at, 36; estab-

New Mexico, 233, 235, 276, 277

lishment of, 127, 155n12, 237, 319;

New York, 119–20, 127, 175, 178–84,

and repatriation of tsantsas, 119, 123, 125–28, 147, 153n5, 154n10 National Museum of the American Indian Act (1989), 124 nation-states: and global indigenous movement, 231–34, 236–41, 243,

187, 204n5, 204n8, 337 New York Times, 38, 324n10 New Zealand, 232, 235, 236, 239, 241 Nicaragua, 222, 231, 243 Nightwatch (Starn), 317 North America: Andean mummies in,

244, 334; and heritage production,

75; archaeologists in, 44; in global

53; and indigenous identity, 69, 72,

capitalist economy, 139; indigenous

89–90, 111n28; and repatriation

movements in, 67–68, 83, 247–49,

movement, 79, 92, 93, 96, 98

255–56; interest in Shuar culture in,

Native America Calling (nac), 76–80, 83, 90, 100, 105n6, 109n25 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) (1990): and Andean mummies, 71, 78, 79,

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

The Nervous System (Taussig), 309–10

142; race in, 4–7, 11–12, 20, 25n15; repatriation movement in, 70–72, 91, 93–97 North American Free Trade Agreement, 253

87; and anthropological research,

North/South Native Web site, 318

304, 333; and archaeology, 43, 46–

The Notion of Tribe (Fried), 297

50, 57n1; and globalization, 81, 237–

Nova, 84–85

38; and indigenous identity, 89; and

Nugent, David, xi, xvi

indigenous relationships, 124; as model law, 90–97; scope of, 104n1,

Oaxaca, Mexico, 244

124, 125, 153n4, 156n12, 156n14; traf-

O Globo, 8

ficking provisions of, 78, 106n11.

Ohlone (indigenous group), 230, 233,

See also repatriation movement Native American Languages acts, 234

239–42. See also Muwekma Ohlone (indigenous group)

Native Andeans, 70–83

Oklahoma, 248, 276, 277, 281, 282

Native Hawaiian Government Reorga-

Omaha (indigenous group), 123–25,

nization Act, 241, 319

237, 239

Native paradigm, 266–68

Omi, Michael, 5, 8, 23n3

“natural” drives, 172, 203n2

“On the Cunning of Imperialist Rea-

Navajo (indigenous group), 233 Nazario, Don, 36–37

son” (Bourdieu and Wacquant), 18 Oracy, Nogueira, 9

362

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

oral histories, 47, 308

Politis, Gustavo, 86–87, 92, 111n28

Orientalism (Said), 300

polymorphism, 23n1

Orpheus and Power (Hanchard), 6,

Pontiac’s rebellion, 247

18–19

population biology, 23n1

Ortega Villa, Fernanda, 111n30

Port Chester ny, 204n5

Ortner, Sherry, 174

Portuguese language, 249, 253, 276,

“other,” 44, 45, 46–50, 123, 263, 283, 331

320 post-Fordism, xi, xxvn2, 285, 331–38

Owens, Louis, 101–3

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 102; The Cunning

Pachakutik Nuevo País political move-

Pratt, Mary Louise, 130, 172, 203

of Reason, 100 ment, 49 pan-indigenous movement. See global indigenous movement

Pre-Columbian Society (Washington dc), 83 Presidio (San Francisco), 230

Park, Robert, 5

Price, David H., xvi

Patterns of Race in the Americas (Har-

Probyn, Elspeth, 291

ris), 3 payments in lieu of taxes (pilot), 191, 199, 205n16

property taxes, 191, 195, 196, 200, 205n16 “Public Sociologies” (Buroway), 38

pbs, 89

Pueblo co, 277

Peabody Museum (Cambridge ma),

Puerto Rican immigrants, 187

123, 125

Puwáinchir, Miguel, 126–27

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Peacock, James, 315 Pelligrini, Carlos, 279

Quakers, 276

Performing Dreams (Graham), 316

Quechua culture, 36

Permanent Forum on Indigenous Is-

Quechua Network Web site, 76

sues, 319 Peru, xiii, 75, 81–83, 92, 132, 188, 222, 243 Pessar, Patricia, 213

Quinatoa, Esthelina, 93 Quito, Ecuador, 144, 293, 294, 304, 306, 307 “Quito Runa,” 294, 303

physiognomy, 85, 109n21 Piedmont region, 275–76, 286n1

Rabinow, Paul, x

Pierson, Donald, 5

raça, 8–9, 11, 25n13

plastination, 73, 104n2

race: in Argentina and Dust Bowl, 278,

Plaza Dorrego (Buenos Aires), 278

283; comparison of, 3–4, 23n1; exis-

political correctness, 22, 27n21

tence of, in Brazil, 11–15; 363

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

race (cont.) experience-near reality of, 6–11; in

89, 304; emotional force of, 97–102,

global society, 285; and indigenous

111n28; and Ghost Dance, 67–68,

identity, 69, 92–93, 95–96, 99,

102–3; globalization of, 233, 236–40,

100; persistence of, in Brazil, 15–17;

245, 334, 335; and indigenous iden-

and political movements, 6, 7, 18,

tity, 72; internationalization of, 94,

24n7, 254; and public policy, 16–19,

111n31; legislation on, 127, 155n12,

22, 24n9; study of, 15–23, 25n16,

156n14; and tsantsas, 123–28. See

295; in suburbs, 175–76, 201, 202,

also Native American Graves Protec-

206n23

tion and Repatriation Act (nagpra)

Race in Another America (Telles), 9–11

(1990)

racial democracy, 17, 26n20

Ricoeur, Paul, xxivn1

racial discrimination, 16, 22, 24n9,

Riley, Rob, 284

25n15, 25n17

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 14, 16

racial formations, 5, 8, 23n3

Ríos Montt, José Efrain, 298

racism, 7, 13, 16, 22, 23n1, 25n15, 25n17

Rivet, Paul, xiii

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 122

Roldós, Jaime, 294

Radin, Paul: Autobiography of a Win-

Romero, Monseñor, 222, 225n9

nebago, 316

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

circulation of human remains, 88–

Roraima, Brazil, 253, 255

Rafael, Vicente, xvi

Ross, Jane Bennett, 129, 132

Ramos, Alcida, 320

Rubenstein, Steven: Alejandro Tsakimp,

Ramos, Arthur, 5

313–14; on Americanist anthropolo-

Rappaport, Joanne, 292, 319, 322n3

gy, 332; career history of, 290, 296–

Rarámuri (indigenous group), 263–66,

301, 305–8; on indigenous identi-

271, 337 Reinhard, Johan, 76, 86, 87, 91, 100; The Ice Maiden, 109n25

ties, 80; on knowledge production, 338; research of, 50, 289–90, 295, 318, 321

Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes), 301

Rushdie, Salman, 284

religion, 98, 101, 222, 267, 276, 294–

Russia, 230

95, 317, 319. See also spirituality remittances: collective, 220–24, 335, 336; to families, 216–20; methods of delivery of, 218–24; types of, 216–17, 335–36 repatriation movement: anthropological research on, 70–83, 305, 315; and

Saami (indigenous group), 236–37 Sabloff, Jeremy: A History of American Archaeology, 43 Sahlins, Marshall, 323n7 Said, Edward, 301, 305; Orientalism, 300

364

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Salamon, Sonya, 204n7

suburbs, 185–86; migration of, to

Salesian missionaries, 307

Sun Belt, 194, 206n20; on subur-

Salmón, Enrique, 289

ban school budgets, 176, 193–96,

Salomon, Frank, 292, 294, 319 Salta, Argentina, 75, 76, 78, 91, 106n10, 110n26 Salvadoran immigrants: hometown

Seri (indigenous group), 263–66, 271 sexuality, 25n16

associations of, 211–12, 335–36; mi-

shamans, 36–37, 305–6, 312–14

gration of, 212–16; remittances of,

Shawnee (indigenous group), 248

216–24

Sheriff, Robin, 20

Salvadoran United Committee for Intipucá, 216 San Francisco Bay Area, 230, 233, 239, 240, 243

Shortridge, James, 285 Shoshone-Bannock tribes, 124 shrunken heads. See tsantsas Shuar (indigenous group): anthropo-

San Jose ca, 240

logical research on, 305–9, 311–15,

San Miguel, El Salvador, 215, 219

336–37; in core and periphery

Sansone, Livio, 5, 20; Blackness without

model, 152n2; and cultural bound-

Ethnicity, 21 San Telmo district (Buenos Aires), 278, 281

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

199 Sennett, Richard, 176

aries, 119–23; ethnographies on, 143–44, 163n28; Euro-American contact with, 132–34; and global

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7

capitalist economy, 138–41; identity

Sauer, Carl, 285

of, 141–48; living arrangements of,

savage image, 121, 130, 133–34, 317

128–29, 156n15; political interests

Savages (Kane), 317–18

of, 305–7, 312–13; population of, 128,

Schiller, Nina Glick, 214

156n13; relationship of, to Achuar,

Schneider, David, 323n7

143, 157n17, 163n28; statuses of,

school budgets: and Latino immi-

129, 157n16; travel of, to United

grants, 195–98; local conflict over,

States, 119–20, 127, 139–41, 145–48,

174, 176–78, 183, 191–93, 200–201;

161n24; and tsantsas, 119, 126, 127,

middle-class parents on, 194–95;

129–35, 141–45, 154n9. See also Fed-

reasons for crises of, 199–200; se-

eracíon Interprovincial de Centros

nior citizens on, 176, 193–96, 199; and tax certioraris, 191, 199, 205n16 Seligmann, Linda, 332

Shuar Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead, 68, 88; Ceremony, 95

Seminole (indigenous group), 248

Skidmore, Thomas E., 24n4

senior citizens: migration of, to

skin color, 9, 11–15, 17, 19–21, 24n11 365

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Slater, David, 256

Souza, Jacir de, 253

Slave and Citizen (Tannenbaum), 3

Spain, 277, 280

Slavery and Race Relations in the Ameri-

Spanish immigrants, 275, 278

cas (Hoetink), 3 Smedley, Audrey, 11–12 Smith, Roger, 109n21 Smithsonian Institution: and Ameri-

320 “Speaking Truth to Power” (Conklin), 39

canist studies, xii; consumers in,

Spicer, Edward, 325n15

134, 159n22; and National Museum

spirituality, 270. See also religion

of the American Indian, 152n4,

Spivak, Gayatri, 303

155n12, 237; repatriations by, 123,

Spradley, James P.: Conformity and

125–27, 153n6, 238

Conflict, 4

Social Analysis, 41

Stamford ct, 189

social class: in Brazil, 4–5, 12–15, 17,

Standing Rock Reservation, 68

255; and globalization, 145; in

Starn, Orin: Nightwatch, 317

suburbs, 172–77, 181–90, 193–95,

Steel, Daniel, 129

198–203, 337

Stevens, Rachel, 195

Société Américaine de France, xii

Steward, Julian, 323n8

Society for American and Oriental Eth-

Stewart, Susan, 135, 137

nography, xxvn3

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Spanish language, 234–35, 244, 293,

Stilgoe, John R.: Borderland, 172

Society for American Archaeology, xv

Strong, William Duncan, xiii, 120

Society of Americanists, xxvn3

structuralists, 296, 298–99

sociology, 7, 24n6, 203n3

Structuring Diversity (Lamphere),

Soriano, Laura, 83 South Africa, 5

204n7 suburbs: borders and boundaries of,

South America: anthropological re-

172–78; child care in, 180, 205n12;

search and teaching on, 315–22;

culture in, 173–74, 177, 201, 203n3,

in global capitalist economy, 139;

204n4; housing costs in, 189–90;

immigrants from, 187, 188; Native

industry in, 184, 189–91; old vs. new

political activism in, 67, 83; repatria-

immigrants in, 185–88; reception of

tion movement in, 70–83, 90–97,

immigrants in, 188–89; school bud-

100; and U.S. repatriation legisla-

gets in, 197; social class in, 172–77,

tion, 125, 127–28

181–90, 193–95, 198–203, 337; study

South and Meso American Indigenous Information Center, 83 Southwest studies, 315, 324n15

of, 174, 178–84, 200–203, 203n3, 204n8 Suitland md, 152n4

366

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Sun clan, 264, 265

Translated Woman (Hernández), 308

Sun Dance, 68

translation, 308–15

Sweden, 236–37, 238

“transnational cognitive space,” 213, 220

symbolic analysis, 292, 293, 296–98,

transnationalism: in anthropological

301

study, xviii–xix, 309, 332; in Brazil, 4–6, 250, 253; and hometown as-

Talahongva, Patty, 76–80

sociations, 212–24; and migration,

Tannenbaum, Frank: Slave and Citizen,

138–41, 160n24; in suburbs, 202.

3 Tapsell, Paul, 235, 239 Taussig, Michael, 305; The Devil and

ment; globalization travel, 130–32, 152n3

Commodity Fetishism in South Amer-

treaties, 241–43, 253

ica, 110n27, 297–98; The Nervous

Treaty of Waitangi, 241

System, 309–10

trickster, 298, 323n8

tax revolts, 206n16

Trimborn, Hermann, xiii

Tecumseh (Shawnee), 247

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 121

Telles, Edward, 13, 14, 18, 19; Race in

Tsakimp, Alejandro, 313–14, 318

Another America, 9–11

tsantsas: circulation of, 84, 132, 138,

Tello, Julio, 92

336–37; and cultural boundaries,

Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), 247

122–23; display of, 142–43, 163n27;

territory, 232, 236, 240–43, 250, 254,

and repatriation legislation, 125–28;

255, 284–85, 334 Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

See also global indigenous move-

significance of, to consumers,

Tewa language, 235

134–38, 157nn18–19, 159n20; sig-

Texas, 292

nificance of, to Shuar, 119, 126, 127,

Thayendanegea. See Brant, Joseph

129–35, 141–45, 154n9; in United

Third World Congress of the Quechua Language, 110n26

States, 120, 126–28, 146–48, 155n11 Tsenkush, Felipe, 127, 153n5

Thomas, Nicholas, 89

Tsosie, Rebecca, 124, 125, 126

Thomas, W. I., 24n6

Tunbridge, J. E., 52, 54

Thompson, J. Eric S., xiii

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 103

Tiwa language, 233, 235

Turner, Terence, 251

Tlingit (indigenous group), 80

Turner, Victor, 323n7

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 268

Twine, France, 20

Torres, Julio Guardita, 80 Towa language, 235

Uganda, 292

transculturation, 102–3

Umon’hon’ti, 123, 125 367

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

unesco, 5–6

University of Buenos Aires, 106n10

United Community of Chinameca, 221

University of California, Berkeley,

United Nations, 319 United Nations Economic and Social Council (ecosoc), 111n31 United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues (unpfii), 111n31 United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, 111n31 United States: and anthropologists,

237–38 University of Nebraska, 124 Up de Graff, Fritz, 132–34, 136, 139, 140, 161n24 Uruguay, 278 U.S. Congress, 127, 153n4, 155n12 U.S. Custom House (New York), 152n4 U.S. Department of Defense, 324n11

324nn10–11; archaeology in, 43, 44,

U.S. Department of the Interior, 242

46, 48–50; and Argentina, 278; at-

U.S. National Park Service, 104n1, 304,

titudes toward mummies in, 77–78;

323n3

community studies in, 204n7,

Usulután, El Salvador, 222

205n9; education and social class

Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, 68

in, 198–99; ethics in, 267, 268;

Uto-Aztecan linguistic family, 265

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

foreign policy of, 291, 298, 335; as immigrant destination, 139, 161n25,

Valle Silva, Nelson do, 9

214, 221, 335; indigenous identity

Venezuela, xiii, 235, 281

in, 68–69, 89, 95, 244; indigenous

viajero(a)s, 218–20

languages in, 233–36; and knowl-

Viking Fund, xiii

edge production, 338; looting in, 86,

Villanueva, Wenceslao, 111n30

109n22; and Macuxi, 255; nativist

“Visions Abya-Yala,” 94

movements in, 174–76; race in,

Vitry, Christian, 75, 77, 78

5–11, 15–20, 22, 24n5, 25n15, 27n21;

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, xxivn1

recognition of indigenous peoples

Vizenor, Gerald, 103

in, 241, 334; and repatriation move-

Volkman, Toby, xvii

ment, 79–83, 87, 90, 100, 237;

volunteer fire departments, 185, 190

reservations in, 241–42, 302; Salvadoran immigrant labor in, 217–18;

Wachtel, Nathan, 87–88

Shuar in, 119–20, 127, 139–41,

Wacquant, Loïc, 4, 18–20; “On the

145–48, 161n24; suburban culture

Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” 18

in, 173–74; transfer of remittances

Wagley, Charles, 26n20

from, 218–24

Wales, 201

University of Arkansas, 123–24

Wallace, Mike, 159n22

University of Brasília, 16

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 151n2, 163n30

368

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,

index

Waorani (indigenous group), 317–18

Wilson, Thomas, xvi

Wapixana (indigenous group), 251, 257,

Winant, Howard, 5, 8, 23n3

257n1

Wolf, Eric, 150n1, 151n2

Wappinger Confederacy, 180, 205n11

women’s movement, 294

Warren, Jonathan, 20

World Bank, 279

Washington dc, 211–12, 214–16, 218,

World Council of Anthropological As-

220–24, 335–36

sociations, xxiv

Washington Post Magazine, 36

World War II, 186, 278

Watkins, Joe, 47, 235–36

Wounded Knee, 68

Weasel Tail, Wilson, 68

Writing Culture (Marcus), 301

Weber, Max, 324n14 Weeckquaesgeek (indigenous group),

Xingu River dam, 249

180 We Exist movement, 253, 255

Yachay Wasi, 81, 83

Welsh language, 235

Yanomami (indigenous group), 256

Westchester County ny, 205n9

Yonkers ny, 204n5

Western Union, 218

yumbada, 294

Western values, 267–68 Zapotec (indigenous group), 244

Wicazo Sa, 88

Zeidler, James, 92, 124, 332–34

Wichita ks, 276–77

Zimmerman, Larry, 50

Willey, Gordon, 43

Zuni Pueblo, 123, 125, 127, 237, 239

Copyright © 2009. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

Whitten, Norman E., Jr., 293

369

Border Crossings : Transnational Americanist Anthropology, edited by Kathleen S Fine-Dare, and Steven L. Rubenstein,