Interdependencies of Social Categorisations 9783954870639

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Daniela Célleri/Tobias Schwarz/Bea Wittger (eds.)

Interdependencies of Social Categorisations

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Series/Colección “Ethnicity, Citizenship and Belonging in Latin America” This series promotes an international scientific dialogue about the social, political and cultural implications of the concepts ethnicity, citizenship and belonging, which serve as conceptual tools for the interdisciplinary Research Network for Latin America to investigate both social dynamics and processes of inclusion and exclusion in past and present Latin American societies as well as in other regions of the world. Esta colección busca promover el diálogo científico e internacional sobre las implicaciones sociales, políticas y culturales de los tres conceptos etnicidad, ciudadanía y pertenencia que constituyen para la Red de Investigación sobre América Latina instrumentos conceptuales para investigar de manera interdisciplinaria tanto dinámicas sociales como procesos de inclusión y exclusión en sociedades pasadas y presentes de América Latina y en otras latitudes del mundo.

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Daniela Célleri/Tobias Schwarz/Bea Wittger (eds.)

Interdependencies of Social Categorisations

Iberoamericana

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Vervuert

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2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Interdependencies of social categorisations / Daniela Célleri, Tobias Schwarz, Bea Wittger (eds.). pages cm -- (Ethnicity, citizenship and belonging in Latin America) ISBN 978-1-936353-14-9 -- ISBN 978-8484897019 -- ISBN 978-3-86527-752-7 1. Social groups. 2. Social groups--Latin America. 3. Group identity. 4. Intergroup relations. 5. Categorization (Psychology). 6. Social psychology. 7. Ethnicity--Latin America. 8. Latin America--Social conditions. I. Célleri, Daniela. HM716.I54 2013 305.8--dc23 2013000667

The project, on which this book is based, has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) under the support code 01UC1012A-E. The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the editors.

Reservados todos los derechos © Iberoamericana, 2013 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2013 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 – D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 ISBN 978-84-8489-701-9 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-86527-752-7 (Vervuert) ISBN-978-1-936353-14-9 (Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing Corp.) Depósito Legal: M-7040-2013 Cubierta: Marcela López Parada Impreso en España por The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706

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INDEX

Daniela Célleri, Tobias Schwarz, Bea Wittger Introduction: interdependencies of social categorisations in past and present societies of Latin America and beyond ...................................

7

THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS Floya Anthias Social categories, embodied practices, intersectionality: towards a translocational approach ....................................................................

27

Sérgio Costa Entangled inequalities in Latin America: addressing social categorisations and transregional interdependencies ..........................................

41

PERFORMANCES OF IDENTIFICATIONS Ulrike Schmieder Interdependencies of class, ethnicity and gender in the postemancipation societies of Martinique and Cuba ...............................................

65

Ezequiel Adamovsky Cipriano Reyes and the paradox of a non-diasporic “negro” identity in Argentina ......................................................................................

91

Dennis Avilés Irahola Decentralisation and local power relations in Chuquisaca, Bolivia .....

115

Olena Prykhodko Creating a feeling of belonging: consumer citizenship as a media project ...............................................................................................

137

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Daniela Célleri Returning home and being runa. Dynamics of in- and exclusion in an Otavalan village, Ecuador .............................................................

163

PERMITTING AND DENYING BELONGING Ursula Regehr Conceptualising citizenship, belonging and exclusion in the Paraguayan Chaco ................................................................................................

189

Tobias Schwarz National belonging in the Dominican Republic. The legal position as an interdependent social categorisation ..............................................

213

Björn Alpermann Class, citizenship, ethnicity: categories of social distinction and identification in contemporary China .........................................................

237

UNTANGLING KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS Sarah Albiez-Wieck Social categorisations in the Tarascan state. Debates about the existence of ethnicity in prehispanic West Mexico ...................................

265

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez Thinking interdependencies. Decolonial feminist perspectives on labour and migration .........................................................................

289

Caroline Braunmühl “Kultureller Rabatt” (“Culture discount”)? The debate about a “cultural defence” in the criminal law, and what gender has got to do with it ...

311

THE AUTHORS OF THE BOOK .............................................................

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INTRODUCTION: INTERDEPENDENCIES OF SOCIAL CATEGORISATIONS IN PAST AND PRESENT SOCIETIES OF

LATIN AMERICA AND BEYOND

Daniela Célleri/Tobias Schwarz/Bea Wittger

The Research Network for Latin America Ethnicity, Citizenship, Belonging is investigating symbolic boundary making and notions of belonging to foster a better understanding of exclusions and inequalities in Latin America. It started from the assumption that this area under discussion can best be understood by looking at the meanings actors attach to quotidian concepts of collectivity, participation, and belonging to institutions, places or groups. In their studies, the networks’ researchers try to look at the three topics ethnicity, citizenship and belonging in an integrated way, asking for connections and exchanges among them (cf. Albiez, et al., 2011). They include historic as much as today’s manifestations of symbolic boundaries and perceptions of (dis-)orderliness in Latin America, focusing on daily interactions and negotiations, yet taking them into account in a complex interrelation with social structures. The networks second international symposium in Cologne (Germany) in September 2011 was dedicated to “Interdependencies of Social Categorisations” in Latin America and other regions of the world. The emphasis on social categorisations stresses the symposiums overall aim to understand and reconstruct perceptions of identifications and differentiations: processes of symbolic groupings, their impacts on in- and exclusions, and their concomitant consequences regarding social inequalities. Ethnicity is one, probably the most salient, way of routine labelling by which belonging is organised (not only) in Latin America. It functions as one of the key topics of the network, and accordingly, the contributions to this volume are concerned with, inter alia, ethnicity. Nevertheless, other categorisations are no less important in their proliferation and in their practical consequences: an individual’s economic position, distinctions based on gender or age, religious beliefs or practices, or an urban or rural origin can be mentioned among many other aspects of belonging that can be, and are in various manners, used by actors to align themselves or others with certain groups. In ‘real life’ however, there are no clear-cut categories that could be

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strictly separated from each other. This can be easily illustrated by the example of ethnicity. Today in Argentina, “negro” is a derogatory term. It might be employed in an explicitly racist way meaning indigenous or African ancestry. During the 20th century though, it was not used primarily against AfroArgentineans; rather it is a generic term for groups of lower social status. This might include–and did indeed primarily in the past–members of the working class and was in this usage not openly related to their phenotype, yet denying them to be culturally ‘pure’ white. Looking seemingly ‘non-white’ has been read by actors throughout the 20th century “as an indication of miscegenation and therefore, by default, of a lower social standing” (Adamovsky, this volume, 93). This is hence implying a racialised group identity and denoting a presumed ethnically mixed ancestry. The proletarian sectors of society were being called “negros” to stress their association with ‘barbarity’, hence exacerbating the symbolic distance between socio-economic groups. In his article on the “non-diasporic ‘negro’ identity in Argentina” in this volume, Adamovsky argues, that movements that confronted the myth of the ‘white’ Argentina existed–implicitly–throughout the 20th century among the lower classes. This can only be understood looking at the long history of the interacting quotidian perceptions of classist and racist groupings.1 Equally complex re-configurations of “ethnic” classifications emerge today in other regions of the world. In China, the categorisations of 56 different minzu (“ethnic groups”), decreed by the central state during the 1950s, “became not just an ethnic category but a comprehensive social categorisation” (Alpermann, this volume, 246). Today, official politics offer the–to some extent privileging–formal status of “ethnic minorities”, yet this leads to an ethnisation of social inequalities as the same official discourses “tend to blame minorities themselves for their alleged ‘backwardness’ and poverty” (op. cit.). Socio-economic and political status categories, tied since the same period to the distinction between rural and urban dwellers, are increasingly colliding with the highly dynamic society of contemporary China: as migrants from rural areas come into the mega cities, the compulsory registration of residence is no longer possible for them, hence they are excluded from basic rights they once held–which can be called “socialist citizenship”

1

This partial overlapping of race and class was equally widespread in 19th century Europe; cf. Gabbert, 2007.

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Introduction

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(op. cit., 242). Institutionalised social categorisations do in this sense interact in a way that can not be conceptualised in an additive perspective. We refer to this complex interweaving of social categorisations as interdependency.2

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN EMIC AND ETIC CONCEPTS While hardly questioned whether interdependencies do actually matter, it is still controversial how to investigate and represent these processes. One problem often addressed is, how many categorisations “intersectional-type” studies (Dhamoon, 2011, 232) could–or should–address. If we act on the assumption that an interdependency framework has to be anti-hierarchical, no single dimension, be it for instance gender, can on its own be sufficient to adequately describe power relations in a society as a whole. The same holds true for race or class. Today, after the demise of the Marxist distinction between one principal and several non-principal contradictions, very few would probably claim to have found the one and only dominant principle of inequality. That’s why in these debates the question, which category should take priority over the others, has long ceased to be central. The question rather is how the various dimensions work together and how they are related to each other. However, some dimensions are almost always mentioned. Where does the dominance of race/class/gender come from? Subsequently, if we ask which categorisations of difference are important and why, we implicitly decide which are less important, and reinsert a hierarchical thinking. Can we thus, at least theoretically, create a complete list of all categorisations and/or categories? Will this list contain the same at all times and in every region of the world? We suggest distinguishing between different theoretical concepts implied in the questions raised: the emic and etic use of categories, or, as Brubaker and Cooper propose calling them, “categories of practice” and “categories of analysis” (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, 4). In everyday practices of differentiation, from an emic perspective of the actors, the attributes of identity and difference used derive from the situations and the actors involved. The interdependencies analysed then include “how different categories interact in 2

We use “interdependency” as a generic term including other approaches concerned with conceptual interrelations.

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shaping subjective experiences, often experiences of discrimination, how they determine access to resources and options and how they are taken up in constructions of identity” (Knapp, 2005, 259). This can possibly mean a long list including not only gender or age, class or occupation, ethnicity, origin, language, religion, or sexual orientation, but many more or just a few of these labels, actors attach to themselves or other. This list will differ according to time and place, and thus to enumerate all possible categorisations would be futile (Klinger, 2008, 40). We will call them, for a more precise delimitation against the following, “social categorisations”. The term etic concept, on the other hand, is reserved for categories of analysis introduced and used when thinking about the social. They are explanatory tools. They do not aim at describing what actors think or use, but at what makes them act the way they act. This indicates social relations, organised in an impersonal way.3 While from a perspective taking into account the social practices, mutually interdependent categorisations are not only likely, but also necessary; the theoretically assumed etic concepts are made up basically different. Such abstractions are ‘invented’ by science as reflection on the world. They are, in our opinion, to be understood most appropriately not as realities, but as heuristic “signposts for sets of social relations” (Anthias, this volume, 30), put up by the researchers in order to sort out relationships, to organise them temporarily and to discuss them with colleagues by means of etic designations. These scholars certainly do not position themselves outside the world, as all science is done by humans who are, themselves, positioned subjects, and are no ‘neutral’ observers. Yet they try to organise the intricate and confusing reality into isolated strands. They necessarily make simplifications and are, usually, aware of this. Those, who want to work theoretically, know that theory does not equal empiricism; “the map is not the territory” (Korzybski, 1958, 58). The evident misunderstanding that often occurs while talking about ‘interlocking’ structures or ‘intersecting’ differences stems from the fact that for both conceptual logics, etic and emic, at times the same terms are employed. Race can be both an actor’s evaluation of human phenotype and the scientific explanation of why this matters to people; gender can equally 3

These theoretical abstractions can be called “world historical systems of domination” (Klinger, 2003, 26, quoting Donna Haraway); “systems of domination” (Dhamoon, 2011, 233); “ontological realms” (Anthias, 2001, 377), among other terms.

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Introduction

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describe the perception of sexual differences as much as the structure behind this categorisation. Some authors thus use different words to distinguish between emic and etic meanings of terms, and devote a few lines to a definition of their understanding of the analytical concepts used.4 Unfortunately, most of the time the same terms are used for the two very different concepts. The problem is not the use of supposedly ‘wrong’ terms, but the ambiguity concerning their usage with respect to different applications. Thus, the theoretical assumption that interdependencies exist does not start from the same basic assumptions in relation to each of the two argumentations. An empirical study is encouraged to portray a lived and experienced situation of exclusion or discrimination as completely as possible. Its analytical examination will be multi-dimensional and will try to take into account all aspects relevant to the participants. No person is only rich or poor, man or woman, old or young, but will always be perceived by other actors in a multidimensional way. And, if we understand this as a process, the positioning of the parties involved is not fixed or static, but results from the interaction. Which of these characteristics are important in the actual interactions depend on the context and the situation and is, thus, an empirical question. This is certainly an implication of intersectional-type approaches. An abstract social-theoretic concept, however, will necessarily recognise the structuring elements and name them accordingly. ‘Dimensions’ or ‘systems’ of inequality are not the actions themselves, but patterns or types of relations, which can only be recognised and labelled in the plan view or by way of comparing many individual situations of interaction. Their scientific denomination is always an abstraction, always ‘artificial’ after all, and not a direct representation of reality. It is intended primarily as generalisation across the actual individual situations of interaction. In the theoretical model of the observer, the result is a limited set of etic concepts; hence most theoretical frameworks distinguish between no more than race, class and 4 To give two examples, Dhamoon distinguishes between “categories of difference (e.g., race and gender)” and “systems of domination (e.g., racism, colonialism, sexism, and patriarchy)” (Dhamoon, 2011, 233); Applebaum reserves the word “race” “to mark phenomena that were identified as such by contemporaries” and defines “racialization” as “the process of marking human differences according to hierarchical discourses grounded in colonial encounters and their national legacies. The meanings of race over time and space in postcolonial Latin America constitute the subject of our historical analysis; racialization is our conceptual tool.” (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003, 2).

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gender.5 This theoretical breakdown of abstractly assumed social relations is artificial, but not arbitrary. The definition of these three dimensions depends on the respective theoretical framework, is comprehensible, and can therefore be criticised or further developed. The explanatory strength of an analytical category like class is that it can clarify how the relations of production/distribution of goods can shape subjectivity; as delimited to gender denoting social organisation of reproduction, the “production of life itself ” (Klinger, 2008, 42); as delimited to race, reserved for the construction of “strangeness” in an unequal world order (Klinger, 2008, 42, 43). These “subsystems” of modern society (Klinger, 2008, 54) can alternatively be seen as “ontological realms”, thinking gender in terms of the realm of sexuality/biological reproduction; ethnos in terms of collectivity; and class in terms of production and reproduction of economic life (Anthias, this volume, 31). Of course, it would be closer to reality to speak of ‘a racist-sexistclassist system’, or simply one “interlocking” (Collins, 1993) system. The epistemological problem of denominating these three elements, however, would still not be solved. It is only the abstract and somehow artificial separation of the bundle of multiple strands of power that allows for thinking and communicating them, since existing interdependencies can only become an object of scrutiny if the individual strands are sufficiently distinguished from each other. The fact alone that dimensions are analytically isolated is not enough to call their subsequent theoretical merging a theory of “interdependency”. The request to study the separated strands of power in an integrated way is basically an artefact of the previous theoretical separation. In contrast, the legitimate desideratum of an interdependency approach undisputedly is: How do interdependencies actually happen? This question may in turn be discussed in specific empirical research only. “The work of theory makes sense”, Degele and Winker emphasise correctly, “only with reference to empirical questions” (Degele and Winker, 2008, 196; our translation). To theoretically define etic concepts is the necessary after-effect. How these analytical concepts are to be defined is a theoretical, how they mutually dependent or influence each other ‘in practise’ is an empirical question.

5

The triad of race/class/gender is sometimes expanded by a forth category like “body” (Winker and Degele, 2009, 37) or “sexuality” (Weber, 2010).

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AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE DUALISM OF “SOCIETY” AND “INDIVIDUAL” In recent years, voices were raised that argued for a shift in the focus of attention from the interactional to the structural level. “Although the programmatic associated with intersectionality is supposed to extend from a microanalytical focus to macro-perspectives aimed at large-scale structures in culture and society, most of the actual studies have concentrated more or less on micro-level analyses” (Knapp, 2005, 259). Therefore, it is called for to no longer carry out mainly micro-studies, in which intricate formations of identifications are examined. Rather, research should also address the question of whether and how structural categories can be examined as “interdependent”. It argues for “a shift from studying identities and categories to studying processes and systems” (Dhamoon, 2011, 240). It postulates that the intersectionality approach, traditionally more concerned with interactions, can be used to advance the socio-theoretical concept building. Therefore the question arises how the many quotidian categorisations relate to structural conditions of society, hence how structure and agency can be theoretically integrated. And more important perhaps: while we endorse the demand for studies to integrate micro and macro approaches, in light of the reasons discussed so far, it appears questionable to us whether to suggest “interdependencies” as the method of choice for this endeavour. In our opinion, the matter at hand is the basic sociological problem derived from the dualism of “society” and “individual” in the Kantian tradition. It resurrects the dualism of structure and agency, prompting a debate which is “essentially philosophical, and cannot be resolved within sociology” (Anthias, 1998, 513). If we adopted the classical understanding of race, class and gender as ‘structures’ in the Kantian sense, one socio-theoretic question would be revived: How do structures organise (or ‘structure’) actions? Do they determine them? Or do they just offer or restrict a finite set of options? How do abstract concepts of social structure–like class, race or gender, understood as macro-level tools to describe complex power relations that work ‘behind the backs’ and independent from the understanding of the actors–relate to empirically observable and researchable quotidian experiences of humans? In the history of sociological theory, however, several approaches have been developed that show alternatives to the classical dichotomy of structure and agency. The integration of structure and action has been

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addressed, among others, by Mannheim’s “Erfahrungswissen” (Mannheim, 1980), by Bourdieus theory of “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1977) or by Giddens theory of “structuration” (Giddens, 1986). This endeavour is sometimes labelled “praxeological approach” (cf. as an overview of recent sociological debates: Reckwitz, 2003; Reckwitz, 2002). To relate ‘conditions’ to ‘actors’ this way already implies to think ‘the social’ in an integrated way. In this tradition, we believe that still actors have to make their decisions, and they make the decisions acting “toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things” (Blumer, 1986). Social reality is always interpretation of reality, always a process of production of interpretations based on former interpretations, shared, passed on, consolidated and modified by way of interactions with others (Keller, 2006, 115). This structure of knowledge–or ‘collective systems of meaning’–structures the perception of the world. Following the Wissenssoziologie (“Sociology of Knowledge”) we conceptualise this structure as merely “guiding actions” (Reckwitz, 2000, 90). The system of knowledge does not consist of determining rules. Rather, routine knowledge is updated contextually and actively in situations of (inter-)actions, yet also adapted and subjected to continuous transformation, since iterations necessarily evoke certain changes (cf. itération in the work of Derrida, 1988, 298). Thus, if we were to ask how to understand the functioning of ‘power structures’ (derived from the macro-structural point of view), we were back at the interactional level, where the interpretative work is done. And there, actors use entangled quotidian assumptions about identity and difference. Any analytical endeavour had to disentangle these strands of the production of meaning, only to show their essential entanglements. To do so, we suggest thinking of (‘structural’) power relations as created, maintained and changed through actions, while they are simultaneously incorporated into the experience of individuals. What is at stake in researching interdependencies is to choose an analytical perspective that doesn’t fall short of analysing peoples actions as simultaneously being structured by and structuring the broader, impersonal social relations. To focus on interdependencies of social categorisations thus constitutes, in our opinion, not a theoretical model or a methodological approach, but “a particular analytical sensitivity” (Anthias, this volume, 27). This sensitivity is reflecting on the ineluctable relatedness of social relations in everyday interactions, even if these relations are, theoretically, distinguishable.

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RESEARCHING AND RE-THINKING INTERDEPENDENCIES Having introduced the necessary distinction between emic and etic concepts, it is hardly necessary to emphasise that we do not suppose a simple causal dependence of one of the possible analytical categories from any other; rather they are mutually making each other possible (as much as single parts of articulating joints wouldn’t be functional). We suggest understanding their delimitation as a purely theoretic one, introduced by researchers to foster dialogue and theory building, not to describe social “reality” itself. Hence any use of additive terms (like “triple” or “multiple oppression”) wouldn’t be meaningful in this context. Rather, social categorisations are processes that always mutually influence each other, while etic concepts are signposts that arrange the observed social life in an artificially ordered way. These considerations lead to two important consequences for our framing of “interdependencies”. First, we employ the term “categorisation” to stress the procedural nature of emic concepts. They do not represent given conceptual entities nor do they rely on unalterable identities, since any identification or indication of belonging emerges in interactions, must be interpreted by the actors and is variable. Thereby we distinguish the term “categorisations” from concepts of analysis. The categorisations, applied by actors in the social processes under scrutiny, are not universally and inherently powerful, but are constantly being made powerful by their actualisation in everyday interactions. To focus on procedural categorisations doesn’t mean they are mere snapshots of momentary interactions. Rather, they reflect former interactions and thereby rely on established power relations, but still have to be made meaningful by actors, have to be applied to ever changing situations and are thus to be flexible and can be manipulated by individual and institutionalised agency. This crucial interpretative work of actors grapples with meanings that are socially derived and collectively shaped; but it is at the same time a process of creation and application of these meanings by the actors. To speak of “doing gender” or “doing ethnicity” shows that any categorisation we understand as both a consequence and a condition of real life interactions (cf. West and Zimmerman, 1987). Second, we ask for not thinking these concepts in an essentialist way. On the contrary, we consider it necessary to view any grouping, be it ‘of practice’ or ‘of analysis’ as internally diverse. A social class, to mention just the obvi-

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ous, is always a very broad aggregation of an economically defined part of the population, including men and women, children and adults; an ethnic group can be, of course, stratified economically. This criticism of theoretical essentialisms became crucial in the intersectionality approach, stressing the crossing of various dimensions of discrimination within any social situation under scrutiny (Crenshaw, 1989; Knapp, 2005, 255). This might seem trivial, but even classifications made in social sciences are not to be exempt from this argument. Probably the most obvious theoretical pitfall is the reification of the analytical concepts used, most prominent the cases of gender and race.6 Besides, the criticism of theoretical essentialism implies the need to avoid historical analysis in which present-day ideas are transferred to interpretations of the past. An anachronistic terminology uses categories of analysis and applies them to societies where in fact no correlating categories of practise existed or where their relevance is not yet proven. This practice, also called “presentism” (Banton, 2010, 128), might lead to the erroneous assumption of the existence of ‘real’ or otherwise practically relevant social groups. Such a critical argument is raised by Albiez-Wieck in her contribution that questions “the existence of ethnicity” in prehispanic America (this volume). The analytical use of “indigeneity” would be a similar example: indígena does not denominate a homogeneous ethnic group anywhere in Latin America, it rather is “highly variable, context-specific and changes over time” (Canessa, 2012, 10). As a political identity used by actors for manifest purposes, this term is of little use as an analytical category.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS VOLUME The individual research projects of the members of the network Ethnicity, Citizenship, Belonging are all empirical and interpretative projects and dedicate themselves to the empirical study of social categorisations in concrete situations. For the conference we have invited speakers to investigate the interrelations between social categorisations in Latin American contexts. To theses case studies we have added studies on other regions of the world

6

This prompted Mara Loveman to state: “‘race’ should be abandoned as a category of analysis”; she suggested “to study ‘race’ only as a category of practice” (Loveman, 1999, 891).

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(Europe, Asia). The collected contributions respond to one or more of the following questions posed by the ongoing theoretical debate about intersectional-type works: How do social categorisations interrelate to and how do they mutually constitute each other? What reinforcements, ruptures or modifications of these categorisations happen in this process? To what extent do problems or contradictions arise from a scientific analysis that actually perceives the examined categorisations as interdependent? In this section we present a brief résumé of each of the following articles. To complement our theoretical thoughts about “interdependencies of social categorisations”, this volume starts with two theoretical contributions. These concentrate less on a micro-logic approach, but aim at conceptualising social relations and structures of power. The first article, by Floya Anthias, is of considerable theoretical depth and will therefore open this volume. It reflects on the notion of intersectionality and proposes a particular analytical sensitivity which attends to the centrality of power and social hierarchy and suggests treating intersectionality as a heuristic device. Anthias stresses in her analysis the need to separate categories at the more ontological and categorical levels before investigating how they relate to one another at the more embodied concrete level of social relations. As a conclusion Anthias develops the potential of using a translocational lens as an accompaniment to intersectionality to bring back the idea of inequality into the discussion of difference. The idea of translocations focuses on locations rather than on groups and recognises hierarchical relations. The article by Sérgio Costa brings together two perspectives on the analysis of social inequalities. By looking at the influence of social categories on shaping social positions of individuals and groups from the introduction of slavery in the Americas up to the present, he first explains how far class, ethnicity and gender have been articulated or not within academic debates about race in Brazil. Second, by focusing on historically emerged “inequality regimes” in the case of Afro-descendants in Latin America, he shows that a country’s position in world economy and its internal inequalities are tightly connected. He concludes conceptualising “entangled inequalities” as a better instrument to analyse interdependencies between different regions as well as between diverse social categorisations. The remaining articles of this volume dedicate themselves to empirically assess the various ways in which social categorisations emerge and are being made powerful by their implementation in everyday social practices.

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The next group of contributions to this volume enquires into performances of identifications: how subjectivities like “citizen” or “black” are being negotiated and given meaning in social practise, how, in this process, certain social categorisations are being made relevant by the actors, and how power relations are thereby reconfigured. The article by Ulrike Schmieder analyses comparatively how the different categorisations of class, ethnicity, and gender were entangled and reconstructed in the slave and post-slavery societies in Martinique and Cuba. She focuses especially on the social and cultural transformations in Cuba and Martinique after the abolition of slavery in 1848 and 1886 to show how new forms of identity and belonging were created during these struggles. Therefore, using a micro historical approach, Ulrike Schmieder looks at the individual and collective agency of former slaves in the processes of transforming labour systems and reorganising gender relations in the post-slavery period. By looking at the particular case of Cipriano Reyes, a labour union protagonist during the 1940s, Ezequiel Adamovsky argues that the current “black pride” in Argentina is rooted in previous activities by labour organisations that existed–implicitly–throughout the 20th century. Their strategy did not subscribe to the antagonising black-white dichotomy. Instead, the prevailing “melting pot” strategy was used in order to challenge the myth of the “white nation”. It included white working class organisations and employed “negro” as a mark of subalternity. The author shows classist and racist group constructions are inseparable. This suggests a hidden ethnic dimension of class identities in 20th century Argentina, but understood by the actors as, what he calls a non-diasporic “negro” identity, and thus not directly referred to. The contribution by Dennis Avilés Irahola looks at the way in which local actors reconfigured power relations at municipal level after the Law of Popular Participation was passed in Bolivia in 1994. She starts from the assumption that the application of the same decentralisation policies in different social contexts in Bolivia results in different allocations of power depending on the pre-existing local social structures. Therefore she analyses eight rural municipalities in Bolivia and shows the relevance of the interplay of social categorisations, in particular language, origin, occupation, and gender in shaping these new power dynamics. Olena Prykhodko is interested in how citizen’s “feelings of belonging” can be learned, constructed and modified through the mediatisation and globalisation of culture. By analysing the German reality casting show Deutschland sucht

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den Superstar (“Germany Seeks the Superstar”), she shows how individual characteristics related to gender, ethnicity and class adscriptions can be managed by the jury of the show and are used by the actors as resources to achieve the image of the expected citizen. Therefore, she conceptualises citizenship as a process of shaping individual identities by creating feelings of collective belonging, in order to produce citizens as both consumers and consumable. Analysing data collected during her field research in a community in the Ecuadorian highlands, Daniela Célleri stresses that it is important to look at ethnicity only as one factor that influences the social status of returning migrant traders. She shows for instance, that when these migrants struggle to be accepted as “Kichwa Otavalos” in their home village, this classification helps them to achieve a stronger social standing but at the same time confronts them with higher expectations about their success as traders. Another seemingly ‘ethnic’ label, the self-classification as “runa”, in turn relies on definitions about social and economical responsibilities and recognition of adulthood. Discussing how these categorisations are negotiated among various groups in the village under study, she argues that ethnicity, age, gender and class interdependently shape the social status of it’s residents. The third group of contributions, Permitting and denying belonging, addresses powerful ascriptions and classifications made “top down”: how national belonging is being defined and affixed to certain groups and not to others. In doing so, these articles enquire how subjectivities change as powerful social actors like national elites or state administrations intervene and thereby shape social groupings. In her article, Ursula Regehr analyses citizenship and nation-building processes in Paraguay starting with independence in the early 19th century. She takes a close look at the dynamics of in- and exclusion of immigrant and indigenous populations in the El Chaco region in the course of the 20th century. She shows how the political inclusion within nation-states as “ethnicised citizens” allowed on the one hand, the legitimation of economic agents such as German-speaking Mennonite Communities that came to dominate other segments of the Paraguayan population. On the other hand, she shows the struggle of indigenous populations for the redistribution of resources and their recognition as culturally distinct citizens within the nation state. By tracing recent changes to the Dominican constitution regarding the acquisition of nationality and showing their connection to immigration policy in Dominican history throughout the 20th century, Tobias Schwarz

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analyses prevailing notions of collective identity in today’s Dominican Republic. He shows how Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born offspring were forcefully, yet partly symbolically, segregated from Dominican population at large by immigration law. This powerful state intervention endued them with a devaluated legal position and made them become a national ‘Other’ to a collective notion of being Dominican. Their demoted legal position put them in an economically less powerful position and racialised them as a group at once. This had an effect of group construction: being Dominican could be experienced in real live as of different social status read in terms of ‘racial’ difference. Therefore, he argues that it would be insufficient to relate the immigrants’ formal position to the dimension ‘race’ alone, but rather sees race and class as interdependently consequential. The contribution by Björn Alpermann adopts the research perspective of intersectionality to study institutional and quotidian adscriptions of belonging that create, sustain and legitimise social inequalities in contemporary China. Comparing the Mao era to the post-1978 reform period he especially focuses on the interplay of the social categories class, citizenship and ethnicity as markers of difference and identification, to show how new social hierarchies are being formed in contemporary China through a complex process of intermeshing social categorisations and party state interventions. The contributions in the last group, titled Untangling knowledge systems, show how a context and power sensitive empirical approach can analyse historical and current cases and ask for the theoretic implications of their findings. They examine the validity and applicability of knowledge systems like neo-colonialism, racism, or sexism within the particular contexts of their studies, and asses their implications, limitations, and contradictions. In doing so, they reveal how human agency deals with power disparities and hegemonic norms, or scrutinise the historicity of knowledge systems. Sarah Albiez-Wieck in her analysis of social categorisations in the prehispanic Tarascan state in West Mexico takes a close look at the question if ethnicity was a relevant categorisation and if ethnic groups existed in prehispanic Latin America, especially Mesoamerica. After some first theoretical thoughts about analysing interdependencies of social categorisations she argues, that the role of ethnicity was less important than other categorisations. Therefore she takes not only a look at the prehispanic situation, but also at the first decades after the Spanish conquest when important transformations in social categorisations took place.

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Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez starts her contribution by looking at political demands of participants in the social struggle during the economic crisis in Spain and discusses the main contradictions of feminisation and precarisation of labour. She illustrates current migration policies in Western Europe and their consequences for undocumented domestic female workers from postcolonial societies. She concludes that contemporary forms of production have not replaced colonial forms of production. Instead, she uses the concept of “coloniality of labour” and its feminisation to show how the intersections of gender, class and ethnicity/race exacerbate the precariousness of domestic work. In Caroline Braunmühl’s article on the argument whether a defendant’s “culture” is legitimately allowed as evidence in criminal court hearings in Germany, Braunmühl shows that addressing presumed differences only applies to groups who are already established as somehow different, thereby aggravating their symbolic exclusion. Based on the fact that “cultural defence” becomes particularly relevant in the context of so-called “honourrelated” crimes, she looks at the interplay between racialised and gendered power relations. The author sees gender as being used to further the symbolic exclusion based on racialised categorisations. This ‘profit’ the racialised exclusion gains from gendered arguments is contingent, yet historically relatively stable. Therefore, from her point of view, the interdependency of race and gender in any particular case at hand cannot be predicted, but has to be established empirically by examining how these categories interrelate within the respective context analysed.

REFERENCES ALBIEZ, Sarah, et al. “Introduction.” Etnicidad, ciudadanía y pertenencia: prácticas, teoría y dimensiones espaciales / Ethnicity, Citizenship and Belonging: Practices, Theory and Spatial Dimensions. Ed. Sarah Albiez, et al. Madrid; Frankfurt a.M.: Iberoamericana;Vervuert 2011. 9-32. Ethnicity, Citizenship and Belonging in Latin America 1. ANTHIAS, Floya. “Rethinking social divisions: some notes towards a theoretical framework.” The Sociological Review, 46.3 (1998): 505-35. — “The material and the symbolic in theorizing social stratification: issues of gender, ethnicity and class.” The British Journal of Sociology, 52.3 (2001): 367-90.

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APPELBAUM, Nancy P., Anne S. MACPHERSON, and Karin Alejandra ROSEMBLATT. “Introduction: Racial Nations.” Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt. Chapel Hill; London: The University of North Carolina Press 2003. 1-31. BANTON, Michael. “The Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of the Word Race.” Ethnicities, 10.1 (2010): 127-40. BLUMER, Herbert. Symbolic interactionism. Berkeley: University of California Press 1986. BOURDIEU, Pierre. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977. Cambridge studies in social anthropology 16. BRUBAKER, Rogers, and Frederick COOPER. “Beyond “identity”.” Theory & Society, 29.1 (2000): 1-47. CANESSA, Andrew. Conflict, Claim and Contradiction in the New Indigenous State of Bolivia 2012. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. . COLLINS, Patricia Hill. “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Race, Sex, & Class, 1.1 (1993): 25-45. CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-67. DEGELE, Nina, and Gabriele WINKER. “Praxeologisch differenzieren. Ein Beitrag zur intersektionalen Gesellschaftsanalyse.” Über-Kreuzungen: Fremdheit, Ungleichheit, Differenz. Ed. Cornelia Klinger, and Gudrun-Axeli Knapp. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2008. 194-209. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 23. DERRIDA, Jacques. “Signatur Ereignis Kontext.” Randgänge der Philosophie. Ed. Jacques Derrida, and Peter Engelmann. Wien: Passagen 1988. 291-314. DHAMOON, Rita Kaur. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.” Political Research Quarterly, 64.1 (2011): 230-43. GABBERT, Wolfgang. “Vom (internen) Kolonialismus zum Multikulturalismus – Kultur, Ethnizität und soziale Ungleichheit.” Achsen der Ungleichheit: Zum Verhältnis von Klasse, Geschlecht und Ethnizität. Ed. Cornelia Klinger, Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, and Birgit Sauer. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus 2007. 116-30. GIDDENS, Anthony. The constitution of society - outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press 1986. KELLER, Reiner. “Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse.” Handbuch sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse. Ed. Reiner Keller, et al. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2006. 113-43. Band 1: Theorien und Methoden. KLINGER, Cornelia. “Ungleichheit in den Verhältnissen von Klasse, Rasse und Geschlecht.” Achsen der Differenz. Ed. Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, and Angelika Wetterer. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2003. 14-48.

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— “Überkreuzende Identitäten – Ineinandergreifende Strukturen. Plädoyer für einen Kurswechsel in der Intersektionalitätsdebatte.” Über-Kreuzungen: Fremdheit, Ungleichheit, Differenz. Ed. Cornelia Klinger, and Gudrun-Axeli Knapp. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2008. 38-67. KLINGER, Cornelia, and Gudrun-Axeli KNAPP. “Achsen der Ungleichheit - Achsen der Differenz: Verhältnisbestimmungen von Klasse, Geschlecht, ‘Rasse’/Ethnizität.” Achsen der Ungleichheit: Zum Verhältnis von Klasse, Geschlecht und Ethnizität. Ed. Cornelia Klinger, Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, and Birgit Sauer. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus 2007. 19-41. KNAPP, Gudrun-Axeli. “Race, Class, Gender: Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12.3 (2005): 249-65. KORZYBSKI, Alfred. Science and sanity. An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. Oxford: International Non-Aristotelian Library 1958. LOVEMAN, Mara. “Is ‘Race’ Essential?” American Sociological Review, 64.6 (1999): 891-98. MANNHEIM, Karl. Strukturen des Denkens. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1980. Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 298. RECKWITZ, Andreas. Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien. Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft 2000. — “Toward a Theory of Social Practices.” European Journal of Social Theory, 5.2 (2002): 243-63. — “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 32.4 (2003): 282-301. WEBER, Lynn. Understanding race, class, gender, and sexuality: A conceptual framework. 2. ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2010. WEST, Candace, and Don H. ZIMMERMAN. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society, 1.2 (1987): 125-51. WINKER, Gabriele, and Nina DEGELE. Intersektionalität: Zur Analyse sozialer Ungleichheiten. Bielefeld: Transcript 2009. Sozialtheorie: Intro.

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THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS

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SOCIAL CATEGORIES, EMBODIED PRACTICES, INTERSECTIONALITY: TOWARDS A TRANSLOCATIONAL APPROACH

Floya Anthias

ABSTRACT In this paper I propose a particular analytical sensitivity which attends to the centrality of power and social hierarchy, and builds on the idea of treating intersectionality as a heuristic device (Anthias, 1998). I also propose a theoretical framing which attends to different levels of analysis relating to boundaries and hierarchies of social life. I believe that it is important to clarify the object of reference of intersectionality in terms of whether it refers to social categories or concrete social relations. I also interrogate the notion of intersection and develop the potential of using a translocational lens as an adjunct to this, paying attention to context, meaning and contradictory locations. Finally, I consider some political implications raised by this approach.

INTRODUCTION There is no doubt that intersectionality approaches are diverse and therefore there can be no singular definition of an intersectional framework. In this paper (which draws in part from Anthias, 2012) I propose a particular analytical sensitivity which attends to the centrality of power and social hierarchy, and builds on the idea of treating intersectionality as a heuristic device (Anthias, 1998). I also propose a theoretical framing which attends to different levels of analysis relating to boundaries and hierarchies of social life. I believe that it is important to clarify the object of reference of intersectionality in terms of whether it refers to social categories or concrete social relations. It is also important to interrogate the notion of intersection as this signals the defining characteristic of the approaches that see themselves as intersectional. I also develop the potential of using a translocational lens as an adjunct to this, paying attention to context, meaning and contradictory locations. Intersectionality approaches hold in common the view that processes of ethnicity, “race”, gender, class (and at times sexuality, disability and age) need

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to be considered simultaneously in order to grasp the complexities of the social world. Attending to the multifaceted nature of social identities and structural and other forms of advantage/disadvantage thereby dispels the idea of homogeneous and essential social categories. Of course, the premise of intersectionality concerning the importance of attending to how social relations of different types interact is hardly new. Indeed, this premise underpins classical sociological theory. In the Marxist schema we find a prototypical intersectional framework (the intersection between economy and society rather than social categories, however; Marx, 1977). In the work of Durkheim we find ideas about complexity and systems, as well as forms of materiality and representation. His premise about the sui generis nature of society (Durkheim, 1970), and of social facts points towards one of the central underlying principles of contemporary intersectionality frames, i.e. the irreducibility of social relations, on the one hand, and the need to look at the social as a complex system of interrelated parts, on the other hand. Weber (1964), too, is concerned with the intersubjectively constituted nature of social life, and with the intersections of economic class and status. The concern with the links between different forms of identity and hierarchy is not new either, and there has been a long-standing interest, both theoretical and political, in exploring the connections between different forms of subordination and exploitation. This includes works by Lenski (1966) on social stratification, Lerner (1973) on black women in America, and the contributions of feminists working within a political economy approach relating gender to class (e.g. Gardiner, 1975; Beechey, 1977). Race theorists have explored the connections between “race” and class (e.g. Myrdal, 1962; Sivanandan, 1976; Miles, 1989). What is new about the set of approaches seeing themselves as intersectional is that they can be distinguished by their location within antiracist feminism and their concern with struggles against subordination, therefore involving a much greater emphasis on bringing onto the theoretical and policy agenda forms of social inequality which have previously been invisible (such as those pertaining to racialised women). The metaphors used include: crossroads, intersections, inter-sexions, interlockings, assemblages, articulations, and connections, amongst others. However, Crenshaw’s (1984) “intersectionality” has become the nomenclature that has had most appeal, and is most widely used. Within this framing different social categories are seen as

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mutually constituted (e.g. cf. Collins, 1990; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Crenshaw, 1994; Brah and Phoenix, 2004, amongst others). Intersectionality approaches look at how different social divisions interrelate in terms of the production of social relations and in terms of peoples lives. They have highlighted divisions amongst ‘women’ by pointing towards processes of racialisation and to a lesser extent class. In this way they have qualified the gender agenda to achieve a more complex understanding of gendered forms of disadvantage. In the earlier debates, particularly in the Marxist feminist concern with gender, one way in which different social divisions were connected was to argue that one of them was most determining (for a review cf. Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992). This found its currency in debates on “race” and class, and gender and class. The tendency was to use a reductionist model, whereby gender and “race” were determined by class. Gender and “race” were treated as epiphenomena, as super-structural elements built upon the real foundation of class relations. A further (and opposite) formulation was in terms of ideas about a triple burden faced by ethnic minority women. Here class, gender and “race” inequalities were treated as separate but were seen as being experienced simultaneously. This position can be criticised as being too mechanistic and entailing an additive model of the oppression of gender, “race” and class. Intersectional approaches have tried to move away from this additive model by treating each division as constituted via an intersection with the others (e.g. Collins, 1993; 1998; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Crenshaw, 1994; McCall, 2005, to name a few). There has been a proliferation of recent writing on intersectionality, pointing to the limitations of some existing intersectionality frames and attempting to provide better theoretical and methodological underpinnings (e.g., Brah and Phoenix, 2004; McCall, 2001; Knapp, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 2006; Walby, 2007; Hancock, 2007; Davis, 2008; Dhamoon, 2011; Winker and Degele, 2011). Despite some difficulties which can be identified with the intersectional approach (such as the danger of taking the categories as given, the potentially limitless number of interconnecting categories, the confusion between intersectional identities and intersectional structures and so on), the main insight is useful, which is that social relations cannot be neatly packaged into those of class, gender, ethnicity and so on. Indeed, it could be argued that it has made visible the highly differentiated nature of disadvantage and advantage.

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This discussion indicates that there is more work to be done by those of us who have been developing intersectionality frameworks. In the following sections I propose a refinement of intersectionality and its wider applicability as a heuristic tool. Firstly, I argue for the need to treat gender (and sexuality), ethnicity/“race” and class as social ontologies as a first step towards an intersectional analysis that looks at how they shape each other. Secondly I look at the level of embodied practices and societal arenas of investigation, as well as the notion of intersection. Finally, I argue for the use of a translocational lens as an accompaniment to intersectionality; such a lens is able to attend to context (the broader environment) and meaning and can help to formulate insights towards an alternative politics to identity politics.

SEPARATING THE CATEGORIES: SOCIAL ONTOLOGIES I will deal here with the separate dynamics of the categories, particularly of gender, “race” and class. I propose treating their basis as ontological. Social ontologies relate to social conceptions about the different realms in the world, or ways the world is organised. This provides their existential basis at the highest level of abstraction, acting as a signpost for sets of social relations in terms of where they are situated. I want to make it clear that at this level, social ontologies do not point to the people themselves or to the specific form that categories take but rather delineate a space or field in the realm of the social. From this point of view, gender can be located in terms of the realm of sex (including sexual difference and sexuality), and biological reproduction. Ethnos (ethnicity and “race”) delineates and specifies the ontological realm of collectivity which involves a space for boundaries around the collective. Class can be located in the social construction of the production and reproduction of economic life (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983; 1992; Anthias, 2002; 2008; 2009; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Social ontologies pertain to the formation of particular kinds of categories which manifest themselves, however, differently at specific times and places. These categories have a different ontological basis, but at the same time share some characteristics. This is where the similarity between the categories can be seen and how the features that characterise one feed into, relate and serve the others too. If we posit the existence of separate although related ontological spheres we can begin to examine how they relate to one

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another. I have argued before that such ontologies are constituted through relationality/dichotomy in terms of the boundaries between and within the spheres, that they naturalise social relations and serve to posit collective attributions for those filling, potentially, these spaces. I will examine these briefly in turn. The principle of relationality/dichotomy: The binary oppositions, common in Western social and political thought, construct mutually exclusive categories relating to the ontologies, and binary oppositions within them. Within the category of gender, for example, there is to be found a dichotomous relation between men and women. The categories of gender, “race”/ethnicity and class are relational, constructing difference and identity. Both gender and “race” are social categories which ask to be filled by people who share some fixed, unchanging essence. In the case of class this is less clear (for a greater exposition cf. Anthias, 1998). The principle of naturalisation: Naturalisation relates to the fact that both gender and ethnic categories are underpinned by a supposedly natural relation. Gender and “race” are spaces that ask to be inhabited by people and discourses which propose a shared fixed, unchanging essence. In the case of gender this is related to the “blindingly obvious fact of sexual difference and heteronormativity” and in the case of “race” to the “blindingly obvious fact of human stock difference or cultural difference” [sic]. Again class is much less clear in this regard. The principle of collective attributions: Gender, “race”, ethnic and class categories construct their subjects in unitary terms. Despite each of the ontological spheres being binary, there is also an assumption of a defining character to the category which constructs sameness of type within each binary, disabling difference within (Anthias, 1998). Categories sort out characteristics based on such ontologically separate realms e.g. specifying particular gender, “race” and class characteristics as criteria for different ontological realms. I will now turn to the level of concrete relations or embodied practices.

CONCRETE RELATIONS AND EMBODIED PRACTICES The ontological realms and their related categories are boundary making forces which assume particular historical and spatial forms. At this level,

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there is a shaping, constitution or effectivity which seeps from one realm to the other. Indeed, at the level of structural outcomes, as well as outcomes for human subjects, relating for example to forms of identity or discursive effects, it is difficult to determine where they originate from because in practice they are mutually interactive and cannot be disassociated. This also involves people, who may also sort themselves out in terms of positionalities and allegiances. This process of differentiation and identification may not tally necessarily, however. Categories are involved in a range of group-making and group-breaking processes and outcomes, but in complex ways. As an example, the ethnic category (as a form of categorisation of populations) is not equivalent to ethnic group (as a group or identity of practice). Ethnic group formation does not derive its dynamics either exclusively or necessarily from the ethnic category. Rather, ethnic group formation is a product of the intersectional relationship between different types of social relations, including gender and class. Concrete social relations are embodied and articulated within different societal arenas at particular conjunctures and within social practices. Each arena acts as a context for the others and enables an exploration of how they interlink with each other. The distinctions presented below are heuristic rather than actual and enable different foci to be investigated. In other words, I am not suggesting that these realms reflect empirically separate social relations, but that it is analytically useful to separate them for the purposes of investigation and comparison. Organisational arena: This focuses on e.g. family structures and networks, educational systems, political and legal systems, the state apparatus and the system of policing and surveillance. For example, how are population categories organised within institutional frameworks? Representational arena: This focuses on the discursive, symbolic and representational facets of the social categories of difference and identity, and the images and texts, the documents and information flows around them. Intersubjective arena: This focuses on actions in relation to others, including non-person actors such as the police, the social security system and so on. This includes the practices of identification, distinction and othering in relation to everyday social interaction. Experiential arena: This focuses on meaning-making and the level of the sociality of the affective and the emotional (including the body), and knowledge production, as part of lived experience. They are examined within spe-

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cific locatable contexts, say in the work place, in the neighbourhood and other social spaces (cf. Anthias, 1998). It is at this level of concrete social relations that we see most clearly the articulation or intersection of social categories within the different arenas and their relations to one another. However, in order to take this forward it is important to interrogate the notion of intersection.

THE NOTION OF INTERSECTION AND MUTUAL CONSTITUTION The metaphor of intersection is used in order to capture the essence of a framing that attends to the mutual constitution of social categories and divisions. This metaphor may be misleading as it suggests that what takes place is similar to being at an intersection or a meeting point where things crash together. However, the sources of the inequalities and forms of violence experienced by people at the intersection might not be a product of the intersection at all, but may be manifested in that space. In other words, something happens at the junction which is not necessarily a product of the different roads that lead to it. The idea of points or instances of intersection is in fact problematic since it doesn’t attend to processes. The already dialogical character of the relations at the concrete or real world level are then displaced by a focus on specific instances only where they are seen to meet, as in instances of racialised women or white dominant men or with issues of “honour” based violence and so on. Not only can this make invisible other relations but in the real world they are already formed or shaped via each other. The notion of intersection is problematic not because we need to find a new metaphor but because it is not signalling the role of the wider environment and how the historical and broader landscape of power, both in terms of production and effects, incorporates gender, ethnicity and class already into its operations. Indeed, broader power relations within social processes and practices need to be considered (as recognised by Collins, 1993, for example). There are two further issues about the mutual constitution of categories. The first is the assumption that all categories are equally salient all of the time (this is a position taken up by Hancock, 2007, for example). But the degrees of importance of one or the other and their types of intersection will vary within different societal arenas (e.g. the experiential, representational, organisational and intersubjective), as well as in terms of given social forces.

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For example practices of securitisation of Muslims in Europe are much more tied to issues of ethnicity and “race”, although they also have class and gender dimensions. Therefore, it may be that the force of one category at a particular point and in terms of a particular focus is much stronger and more manifest than others. The second assumption with intersection is the idea that, in colliding or merging together at given points, they reinforce each other in one direction, i.e., they strengthen each other. However, they can also produce contradictory elements pulling in different directions. In my work I have emphasised the existence of dialogical and contradictory positions and positionings. The articulation (intersection, interlocking or whatever term is preferred) of social divisions at this more concrete level of analysis can be mutually reinforcing (e.g. as in the case of particular racialised migrant women). In this case social divisions articulate to produce a reinforcing set of practices of subordination. However, they may on the other hand construct multiple and uneven social patterns of domination and subordination i.e. produce contradictory locations at particular conjunctures (as in the case of racialised men or dominant women who inhabit a different location in terms of the parameters of “race” and gender). A man may be subordinated in class terms, but is positioned advantageously in relation to his female partner and may exercise patriarchal forms of power over her. A migrant woman may be subordinated as a cleaner, but has a degree which gives her good life chances in some contexts. We also need to attend to the transnational dimensions of context and time, including the realities of multicultural and cosmopolitan spaces and digitalised communities (and who is excluded). In order to deal with some of these issues, and without necessarily abandoning the use of intersectionality, I have tried to rethink them through developing a translocational lens.

TRANSLOCATIONAL POSITIONALITIES In this section of my paper I want to revisit the concept of translocational positionality (Anthias, 2002; 2008; 2009) which I see as an accompaniment to the notion of intersectionality. Whilst the notion of intersections has found a great deal of response, particularly amongst European and North American feminists, it has not been taken up by social scientists more broad-

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ly. Part of the difficulty relates to forms of academic closure and the tribal character of different areas of the social scientific community. However, one problem is the dominance of the brand of intersectional thinking that focuses on the development of hybrid social categories or groups which are seen as particularly disadvantaged. Therefore, intersectionality is seen as a tool for identifying the particular disadvantages of such ‘hybrid’ social categories (e.g. black working class women). Although such an exercise is important in its own right, this has meant that intersectionality has not been seen as a tool with wider application theoretically. Intersectionality has thus too often been seen as a feminist rather than a broader analytical frame. In focusing on social divisions as parameters relating to boundaries, hierarchies as well as to ontological spaces (cf. Anthias, 1998 in particular), thereby using the notion of translocational positionality (Anthias 2002, 2008), I have tried to work towards a complex recognition of hierarchical relations which has a wider theoretical resonance. Using the idea of translocations, there is a focus on locations rather than a focus on groups, which is related to the notion of social spaces. These social spaces exist within a hierarchically organised social structure and involve forms of inclusion and exclusion and forms of enablement and disadvantage. In other words, locations relate to the stratification systems of society (indeed at the transnational field) but within a contextual and chronographic context i.e. they inhabit a ‘real time and place’ context. If social locations can be thought of as social spaces defined by boundaries on the one hand and hierarchies on the other, then we are forced to think of them in relation to each other and also in terms of some of the contradictions we live in through our differential location within these. The notion of ‘location’ recognises the importance of context, the situated nature of claims and attributions and their production in complex and shifting locales. Within this framework, difference and inequality are conceptualised as a set of processes, and not possessive characteristics of individuals. This not only denotes the complexities of hierarchy but allows privileging of a particular categorical formation (such as gender or class) at a specific conjunctural level rather than in any essential or given way. It thereby avoids both the problems of a thoroughgoing relativism as well as the static nature of fixities around social location. The notion of intersectionality potentially suffers from both these possible problems if it treats the effectivities at the intersections of each category as equivalent, thereby refusing to allow for sys-

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tematic forms of oppression emanating from the dominance of particular social relations (relating to say racism or sexism framed through the power of capital for example). “Translocational” thereby treats lives as being located across multiple but also fractured and interrelated social spaces.

SOME POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS The major advantage, politically, of this conceptual framework is that it takes us beyond the theoretical and political impasse of identity politics. Some intersectional framings hold the danger of producing more complex or hybrid forms of identity (for example working class racialised women). The translocational approach on the other hand brings back the idea of inequality into the discussion of difference. Moreover, difference and inequality are conceptualised as a set of processes, and not possessive characteristics of individuals. This also enables looking outside the sphere of human experience and interrogating discourses, practices, and structures at the more “macro” level of analysis. The concept of translocational positionality signals more radical conceptualisations of diversity also, away from those based on difference to those based on social location and positioning. Commonalities across people who share hierarchical positions are stressed, despite being categorised as “different” to each other. It thereby helps in developing more dialogical political struggles which are not tied to identity and difference but to building solidarities. A translocational lens turns attention away from differences towards the broader landscape of power within which these are formed, spill over into each other, reinforcing and reshaping, allowing for contestations and challenges. This opens up the possibility of more reflexive forms of political struggle and avenues to greater dialogue and collaboration between groups organising around particular kinds of struggles rather than particular kinds of identities. This suggests a politics of solidarity rather than a politics of identity. Within such politics, the “other” need not remain the other and it becomes important to take responsibility for their well being. Levinas’ (1998) idea of subjectivity itself as “a form of trespass, which impinges on the other” (Popke, 2003, 304), therefore demanding responsibility towards the other is an example of this. Bauman talks of the need for a demonstration of an ethic of care towards the unfamiliar, the vulnerable and those at risk (Bauman,

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2007). This too has resonances with the notion of solidarity that emanates from a translocational lens as I am using it here.1

CONCLUDING REMARKS In this paper I have tackled the need to separate categories at the more ontological and categorical levels before investigating how they relate to one another at the more embodied concrete level of social relations. I have argued that we need to acknowledge the ontological level of social divisions as constituting separate and interrelated realms which share forms of binarisation, naturalisation and collectivisation. I have proposed the importance of framing analysis through recognising the interplay also within different societal arenas, the experiential, organisational, intersubjective and representational; this goes beyond the concern noted in the past between distinguishing between a structural and an identity based analysis (the latter are incorporated and added to by this framework). I have proposed a framing which pays attention to broader social relations not just in terms of stressing the importance of the broader environment within which they are played out. Political mobilisation is not conceived as emanating from identity markers or categorisations per se, but through the occupation of particular locations in the hierarchical structure at particular points in time, therefore lending strength to coalitions and solidarity across categorical formations. Issues of power and social structure now assume centre stage instead of being replaced by a focus on social categories.

REFERENCES ANTHIAS, Floya. “Rethinking social divisions: some notes towards a theoretical framework.” The Sociological Review, 46.3 (1998): 505-35. — “The material and the symbolic in theorizing social stratification: issues of gender, ethnicity and class.” The British Journal of Sociology, 52.3 (2001): 367-90. — “Where do I belong? Narrating identity and translocational positionality.” Ethnicities, 2.4 (2002): 491-515. 1

See also the related discussion about transversal politics in Yuval-Davis, 2012.

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— “Thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: an intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging.” Translocations, Migration and Change, 4.1 (2008): 5-20. — “Translocational belonging, identity and generation: questions and problems in migration and ethnic studies.” Finnish Journal of Ethnicity and Migration (FJEM), 4.1 (2009): 6-16. — “Intersectional what? Social divisions, intersectionality and levels of analysis.” Ethnicities (2012). Web. 30. Nov. 2012. . ANTHIAS, Floya, and Nira YUVAL-DAVIS. “Contextualizing Feminism: Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions.” Feminist Review, 15 (1983): 62-75. — Racialised Boundaries - Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. London: Routledge 1992. BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press 1997. BEECHEY, Veronica. “Some Notes on Female Wage Labour.” Capital and Class 3 (1977): 45-66. BRAH, Avtar, and Ann PHOENIX. “Ain’t I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5.3 (2004): 75-86. COLLINS, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. London: Routledge 1990. — “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Race, Sex, & Class, 1.1 (1993): 25-45. — “It’s All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia, 13.3 (1998): 62-68. CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” The public nature of private violence: The discovery of domestic abuse. Ed. Martha Albertson Fineman, and Roxanne Mykitiuk. New York: Routledge 1994. 93-118. DAVIS, Kathy. “Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful.” Feminist Theory, 9.1 (2008): 67-85. DERRIDA, Jacques. Of hospitality (translated by R. Bowlby). Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000. DHAMOON, Rita Kaur. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.” Political Research Quarterly, 64.1 (2011): 230-43. DURKHEIM, Émile. The Rules of Sociological Method. 1895. London: Routledge and Kegan 1970. EQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION. Equality Act 2010, Government Equalities Office 2010. Web. 22 May 2012. . GARDINER, Jean. “Women’s Domestic Labour.” New Left Review, 89 (1975): 47-58.

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HANCOCK, Ange-Marie. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm.” Perspectives on Politics, 5.1 (2007): 63-79. HOOKS, Bell. Ain’t I a woman. London: Pluto Press 1981. KNAPP, Gudrun-Axeli. “Race, Class, Gender: Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12.3 (2005): 249-65. LENSKI, Gerhard Emmanuel. Power and Privilege. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press 1966. LERNER, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage 1973. LEVINAS, Emmanuel. Entre nous: On thinking-of-the-other (translated by M. Smith and B. Harshav). New York: Columbia University Press 1998. MARX, Karl. A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. 1859. Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977. MCCALL, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30.3 (2005): 1771-1800. MILES, Robert. Racism. London: Routledge 1989. MYRDAL, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The negro problem and modern democracy. 1944. New York: Harper & Row 1962. POPKE, E. Jeffrey. “Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space of community.” Progress in Human Geography 27.3 (2003): 298-316. SIVANANDAN, Ambalavaner. “Race, Class and the State.” Race and Class, 17.4 (1976): 347-68. WALBY, Sylvia. “Complexity Theory, Systems Theory and Multiple Intersecting Inequalities.” Philosophy of Social Science, 37 (2007): 449-470. WEBER, Max. Theory of Social and Economic Organisation. 1947. London: Macmillan 1964. WINKER, Gabriele, and Nina DEGELE. “Intersectionality as multi-level analysis: Dealing with social inequality.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18.1 (2011): 51-66. YUVAL-DAVIS, Nira. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (2006): 193-209. — “Dialogical Epistemology—An Intersectional Resistance to the ‘Oppression Olympics’.” Gender and Society, 26.1 (2012): 46-54.

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ENTANGLED INEQUALITIES IN LATIN AMERICA: ADDRESSING SOCIAL CATEGORISATIONS AND TRANSREGIONAL INTERDEPENDENCIES1

Sérgio Costa

ABSTRACT Social inequalities have been conventionally researched as a synchronic process framed within national borders and articulated by the concept of class. This means: the established scholarship has considered neither the historical dimension nor global entanglements nor interdependencies between class and other social classifications such as gender, race, and ethnicity which shape existing inequalities. Departing from world system and postcolonial theories as well as from recent debates on transnationalism, the paper first presents a set of resources for overcoming current deficits in the research of inequalities. The concept “inequality regime” occupies the centre stage: As a relationally–in opposition to a spatially–determined category, inequality regimes represents an analytical framework able to capture transregional, historical and social interdependencies involved in the production and reproduction of inequalities. In order to illustrate how these resources operate analytically, the second part of the paper discusses the case of social inequalities faced by Afro-descendants in Latin America.

INTRODUCTION Social inequalities represent one of the core subjects of Latin American and international social sciences. Contemporary scholarship usually defines social inequalities “in a broader sense” encompassing both socio-economic and power asymmetries (Kreckel, 2006). Conventionally, inequalities have been researched as synchronous processes within the frame of national borders and articulated in the concept of class. This means that established scholarship (e.g.: Klasen, 2009) has not adequately considered the historical dimensions and global entanglements 1

I would like to thank the editors of this volume and specially Tobias Schwarz for their valuable criticism and suggestions to an earlier version of this paper.

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such as the insertion of a certain society in world economy, degree of political dependence on international organisations, constraints imposed by international law, etc. that have shaped existing inequalities. Also the interconnections between class and other social categorisations relevant for determining inequalities have been insufficiently explored. A number of recent contributions try to correct these analytical deficits from different perspectives. In order to overcome methodological nationalism, a first group of contributions has focused on articulations of national and global structures of inequalities showing how inequalities correspond to entanglements between social processes at different geographical levels: local, national, global. A second group of contributions has investigated intersections between social ascriptions or categorisations, particularly race, class, gender, and ethnicity assuming that these ascriptions configure different axes of social stratification. Accordingly, a position of a person (or group of persons) in both socio-economic and power structures is defined as a result of the interdependencies between her or his location within class, gender, race, and ethnicity related hierarchies.2 The state of the art of Latin American research on interdependencies between inequalities observed in different world regions and on relations between different axes of social stratification is unbalanced. In fact, the research on the latter has over the years already led to an accumulation of important findings (Hoffman and Centeno, 2003). In contrast, research on entanglements between structures of inequality in different regions is less developed. This field has an important precursor in dependency theory (Cardoso and Falleto, 1969). Since the 1980s, however, the research on inequality in Latin America has been increasingly dominated by econometric approaches which have served to redirect the analytical focus toward a nation-state centric perspective (e.g.: Klasen and Nowak-Lehmann, 2009). This paper presents a brief balance of the debates in both fields. In the first section, I present a cursory overview of both areas that reflects their varying states of academic research. Correspondingly, the remarks on the interdependencies between the diverse axes of stratification will focus on the 2 Although racial and ethnicity related adscriptions are interconnected, I follow here authors (e.g. Almeida, 2000) who separate them analytically: While racial adscriptions are justified primarily by alleged phenotypic differences, adscriptions related to ethnicity refer to a broader set of presumed differences including culture, habitus, origin, language etc.

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discussion in and about Latin America. The interdependencies between different regions, however, are placed in a larger international context. This first section is closed with some considerations on the approach entangled inequalities which represents an attempt to overcome current deficits of research on interdependent inequalities. In order to illustrate how entangled inequalities analytically operate, the second half of the paper discusses the case of social inequalities which affect Afro-descendants in Latin America.

SOCIAL INEQUALITIES AND INTERDEPENDENCIES Axes of stratification: class, race, gender, and ethnicity In Latin America, research on the links between race, ethnicity, and class has been carried out since the 1930s. The works by U.S.-American sociologists on race relations in Brazil are particularly noteworthy. The first systematic study can be accredited to the doctoral thesis of Donald Pierson, a scholar of the Chicago School, who carried out his field research in Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia,3 between 1935 and 1937. Pierson (1942) concluded that the inequalities he observed could best be understood by focusing on the category of class. The question of racial discrimination was referred to as an afterthought, that is, as an individual ‘deformation’ without sociological relevance. In light of this partiality, Pierson’s study elaborates on the overarching question of the differences between caste and class. He was primarily concerned with demonstrating that social inequalities in Brazil are not reproduced by a rigid caste system based on ‘skin colour’, but that Brazil had succeeded rather in setting up a multi-racial class society in which upward social mobility was possible despite racist ascriptions.

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The region of Salvador, the capital of the Brazilian State Bahia, is characterised by an important presence of Afro-descendants: 51.7% and 27.8% of the population in Salvador classify themselves under the Brazilian census categories “preto” (black) and “pardo” (brown), while in the whole of Brazil only 43.1% self-classify as “pardo” and 7.6% as “preto” (cf. IBGE, 2011). Recently, the region has experienced a process of “reafricanisation”, i.e. a reinvention of cultural, religious, and artistic manifestations associated with an African origin (Pinho, 2010).

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Years later, Wagley corroborated Pierson’s conclusions with regard to the disappearance of racial castes, but not without adding the following remark: “With rare exceptions, the people of the upper class of Brazil are Caucasian in physical appearance […]. The criterion of race becomes most crucial in determining social position” (Wagley, 1952, 148f.). Marvin Harris (1956) built on this point of view concluding that in his research region, Minas Velhas, also located in Bahia, the assumed skills and talents of the population under study could be placed on a scale according to the category of ‘skin colour’: the ‘whiter’ an individual was categorised the more likely positive skills and talents were attributed to her or him. Harris identified two fundamental aspects: Firstly, he found that the racialising categories associated with skin colour should be placed on a gradual scale, rather than consisting of two binary poles between groups of white and black classified according to ascendancy as known from the U.S.-dominant model of racial relations. For Harris, such a gradual scale had enormous importance since it defined phenotypical characteristics in such a way that not only whites but also blacks could use the scale to claim superiority over others who were categorised as darker. Secondly, Harris refers to the lack of a simple and immediate overlap of the categories of race and class. That is, despite the significance of physical traits for building social ascriptions, and thus an individual or group’s social position, this aspect competes with other factors even though such physical characteristics are never fully neutralised on the scale. Nevertheless, they are given more or less weight depending on the situation of a certain individual with regard to the other factors that are seemingly relevant in existing classifications: There is no status-role for the Negro as a Negro, nor for the white as white, except in the ideal culture. Race is but one of several criteria, which will determine how the mass of other individuals will actually behave toward him. In other words, wealth, occupation, and education, the other three major ranking principles, have to a certain extent the power of defining race. It is due to this fact that there are no socially important groups in Minas Velhas, which are determined by purely physical characteristics (Harris, 1956, 126).

In his comparative study on Brazil and the United States, Degler (1976, originally: 1971) agreed with Harris’ statement that having a ‘black skin’ represents both a barrier for social upward mobility and a cause for social exclusion. According to Degler, what distinguished Brazil from the United States

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at this time was what he called the “mulatto escape hatch.” He believed that the presence of “mulattoes” who counted as “socially acceptable” blurred the “colour line.” In this respect, and unlike in the United States, the large social presence of ‘mulattoes’ complicated the idea of a “white race” and a “black race” as an all-encompassing attribute that overshadows all other characteristics. However, this aspect did neither stop the advancement nor the continuous circulation of racist thought and racist practices. A research group at the Universidade de São Paulo around the sociologist Florestan Fernandes came up with similar findings, as did Fernandes’ doctoral students F. H. Cardoso and O. Ianni (Cardoso, 1962; Cardoso and Ianni, 1960; Ianni, 1966). Fernandes’ own research in Sao Paulo (Bastide and Fernandes, 1959; Fernandes, 1965) also demonstrated the significance of racist attitudes for explaining socio-economic and power inequalities in Brazil (see also Guimarães, 2002). Since the 1980s, new generations of U.S.-American social scientists and Brazilian scholars trained in the United States have been examining the relations between whites and blacks in Brazil by focusing mainly on the category of race. This theoretical and methodological perspective known as “racial studies” currently represents a hegemonic research paradigm of sociological studies on racism in contemporary Brazil (cf. Hanchard, 1994; Telles, 2003). Within this framework, the understanding of race as an analytical category is legitimatised through observations of social inequalities, which are predicated on racist ascriptions. Basing their work on social indicators, representatives of the field of racial studies emphasise that racial inequalities in Brazil follow bi-racial patterns comparable to categorisations used in the United States. According to this view, access to social mobility is organised alongside a bipolar hierarchy, despite the reality of many different skin colours that shape an individual’s self-perception (Costa, 2006). For the purposes of this paper, two important distinctions must be drawn between the first set of studies carried out by U.S.-American researchers until the 1970s and a second set conducted since the 1980s, when racial studies became a dominant paradigm. Indeed, social scientists like Pierson and Harris spoke of racial relations. However, this aspect was tied to an examination of different forms of group relations (ethnic, cultural, inter-religious and so forth). Racial studies, in contrast, define the polarity of white and black as central, thus losing sight of ethnicity–that is, processes of socially signifying and performing body features–as an element that shapes social inequalities.

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However, racial studies have absorbed discussions on intersectionality, a debate that began in the United States at the end of the 1980s. As a consequence, racial studies scholars have included gender alongside race discrimination as a central cause of inequality (see Lovell, 1995, Nobles, 2000). Research carried out before the 1980s mostly ignored this dimension. For the examination of interdependencies between different axes of stratification in Latin America, and above all in the Andes region, the concept of “horizontal inequalities” is equally relevant. This term has been coined by development economist Frances Stewart (Stewart, 2000; Stewart, 2010; Stewart, Brown, and Mancini, 2005). According to Stewart, an individual’s social position in a given society corresponds to the sum of vertical and horizontal inequalities. The former refers to the differences between individuals on a social scale, and the latter to the differences between groups. By focusing on horizontal inequalities, Stewart aims to broaden the conventional economic view on the causes of social inequality. Accordingly, she distinguishes groups not only using economic factors, but also applying political, religious, ethnic, racial, and gender-specific criteria. However, the question of group definition is still difficult to answer: Given that an individual can at the same time feel a sense of belonging to different groups, how does one define a group? Additionally considering the inequalities that group affiliations engender, a causal relationship between group membership and inequality is by no means obvious. Stewart accordingly argues the following: To some extent, then, group boundaries become endogenous to group inequality. If people suffer discrimination (i.e. experience horizontal inequality) they may then feel cultural identity more strongly, particularly if others categorise them into groups for the express purpose of exercising discrimination (thereby creating or enforcing HIs [horizontal inequalities]) (Stewart, Brown and Mancini, 2005, 9).4

In line with the horizontal inequalities approach, Thorp and Paredes (2010) have examined social inequalities in Peru and identified three main groups: white, mestizos, and indigenous. In combination with other signifi-

4

Stewart, et al. (2005) offer a pragmatic solution in order to circumvent difficulties in defining relevant groups: Accordingly, one should test empirically the influence of different social categorisations on social inequalities.

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cant axes of stratification–in particular, locality of residence (rural, urban, etc.), gender and class–an individual’s membership to one of these three groups configure his/her position in Peruvian society. This is illustrated by the data on poverty in Peru: While only 9% of Peruvians identified as white are poor, 53.4% of Peruvians identified as indigenous and 28% of Peruvians identified as mestizo are poor.

Global, transnational: inequalities and entanglements Among recent efforts for overcoming methodological nationalism in the research on inequality, two perspectives can be singled out: the world-system or global approach and the transnational approach. Departing from dependency theory and from early works of Immanuel Wallerstein, the world-system approach focuses on the interdependencies between global and national levels as well as the historical character of inequalities. The recent work of Moran and Korzeniewicz (Korzeniewicz and Moran, 2008; 2009; Korzeniewicz, 2011) represents a paradigmatic example of the developments of inequality studies as part of world-system research. These authors differentiate between a first group of countries, which are characterised by a high disparity in income distribution, and a second group of countries which show only slight differences in income disparity. Their studies have ascertained that the position of the countries included in each of these two groups has, for the most part, not changed since the eighteenth century. It becomes clear, then, that these inequality standards go as far back as the colonial period. In contrast to the hitherto hegemonic literature, the authors demonstrate that the persistence of low and high levels of income inequality cannot be explained by domestic factors alone. Instead, a country’s potential to remedy existing inequality through redistributive policies is inextricably tied to the global economy and world politics. Therefore a country’s position in world economy and its internal inequalities are interdependently connected: The arguments we advance require an alternative perspective on stratification. Rather than being nationally bounded, […], institutional arrangements constitute relational mechanisms of regulation, operating within countries while simultaneously shaping interactions and flows between them. (Korzeniewicz and Moran, 2008, 11)

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The position of social actors in transnational structures of inequalities rather than historical formations of inequality is the central focus of transnational approaches in the research on equality. I would like to refer briefly to the research of two German sociologists, Ludger Pries and Anja Weiß as exemplary for this approach. Both work on inequality and transnational migration. Pries’ empirical work (2008) is principally concerned with labour migration between Mexico and the United States. He argues that the traditional unit of reference in the research on inequality, that is, nation-state borders, does not suffice alone in order to explaining how labour migrants are embedded in structures of inequality. Indeed, the potential social mobility of these migrants is not only determined inside Mexico or the United States, but simultaneously shifts between several national labour markets. According to Pries, these migrants move between new transnational, pluri-local spaces, where new forms of access to rights are practised, and changes to material living conditions by way of remittances and information exchange also occur. Therefore, it is worthwhile for inequality research to take pluri-local/transnational spaces seriously: Alongside these units of analysis–enmeshed like Russian dolls–(local, national, supranational and global), pluri-local as a unit of analysis for phenomena such as household economy or education strategies is of fundamental importance like in the case of transnational migrants and social space distributed over different national societies (Pries, 2008, 62).

Anja Weiß’ work (Weiß, 2005; Weiß and Berger, 2008) focuses on highly skilled migrants in Germany. Unlike Pries, she is not searching for a spatial unity of reference to help explain new transnational biographies. Rather, she is looking for categories to describe the social position of actors beyond national borders. Basing her analysis on Bourdieu’s concept of capital, she shows how certain groups of migrants hold transnationally valid cultural capital, so that their position in the receiving society is partially determined by this accumulated capital. In other cases accomplishments which enjoy high esteem in the country of origin (e.g. a university degree from an elite university in India) are not recognised in the new country of residence: A migratory life-course may be characterised by social autonomy. And it can structurally be defined as a portfolio of resources that are globally acknowledged and asked for. A specific subgroup of highly skilled migrants combines both fea-

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tures to some extent. As their cultural capital is transnationally accepted and asked for, barriers to migration are reduced, which permits them to move with few restrictions in globalised labour markets. The majority of migrants are in a less desirable position. Migration results in a depreciation of their location-specific capital. Nevertheless, migrants are able to improve their social position with spatial change (Weiß, 2005, 723).

Articulating social categorisations, historical, and transregional interdependencies Up to this point, I have focused separately on research approaches which examine interdependencies between social inequalities and various social categorisations (class, race, gender, ethnicity etc.) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ties between global or transnational processes and social inequalities. The Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America is working on integrating both forms of interdependencies by constructing an approach of “entangled inequalities”5. Accordingly, inequalities are defined as asymmetries between positions of certain individuals or groups of individuals in a relationally (not spatially) determined context. This concerns economic positions (defined by income, access to resources and so on) as well as political and legal entitlements (rights, political power etc.). As becomes obvious here, entangled inequalities as a product of interdependencies between different regions (i.e. transregional entanglements) as well as between diverse social categorisations cannot be understood by a predefined spatial unit of analysis. Rather, what is needed are relational units able to incorporate all (relevant) factors contributing to structures of inequality. These relational units should vary depending on the respective object of investigation. In certain cases, the concept of inequality regime has proven particularly useful in exploring existing entangled inequalities. 5

The focus on entangled inequalities is inspired by Conrad and Randeria (2002) who coined the expression “entangled modernities” in order to overcome both Eurocentric interpretations of modern history and the concept of multiple modernities. Similar to Conrad and Randeria we insist on interdependencies between structures of inequalities observed in different world regions. Going beyond their research focus, we use the concept entangled inequalities also to describe interdependencies between different axes of stratification. Cf. http://www.desiguALdades.net.

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According to my own definition, an inequality regime6 includes: – Logics of stratification/redistribution defined as static (caste societies), dynamic (class societies) or combined (class with racial/ethnic/gender ascription) – Political, scientific, and popular discourses according to which individuals or groups interpret and construct their own positions and that of others in society – Legal and institutional frameworks (e.g. apartheid law, multicultural or anti-discrimination laws) – Policies (e.g. racist migration policies, integration or compensatory policies) – Models of “conviviality” (Gilroy, 2004: xi) in everyday life (segregating or integrating convivial forms). On the basis of this definition of an inequality regime, I explore, in the following section, inequalities that affect Afro-descendants in Latin America.

AFRO-DESCENDANTS IN LATIN AMERICA Demographic assessment From a socio-economic, political, and cultural perspective, Latin American Afro-descendants represent a very heterogeneous population. Accordingly, this demographic category includes different groups as such as communities on the coast of Colombia distinguished by particular life forms and traditions transmitted over generations, and an emerging middle class in São Paulo that is well integrated into the labour market of this global city.

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Joan Acker (2006) developed the term “inequality regime” and with it an entire research programme dedicated to exploring the relations between gender, race, and class inside organisations. Her work is a powerful contribution to the discussions on intersectionality, but one that does not deal with the transnational or historical dimension of inequality. Therefore, despite the semantic similarities, the term “inequality regime” used here has little in common with Acker’s research programme.

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This heterogeneity is also reflected in demographic statistics. Out of 19 Latin American countries, 16 record ethnic self-identification in their census. Nine countries explicitly list a box for an Afro-Latin American group identity. The corresponding question, however, varies from country to country. In Brazil, Cuba, or El Salvador one is asked for skin colour (black, white or brown). The census in Honduras and Guatemala asks for “ethnic identity” according to groups such as “Garífuna” or an English-speaking black minority (Antón, et al., 2009). The categorial discrepancies between the census in the various Latin American and Caribbean countries make it difficult to accurately determine the size of the Afro-Latin American population(s). According to an estimate from ECLAC/CEPAL, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, Afro-descendants make up approximately 30% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean–or 150 million out of 500 million. Geographically, Afro-descendants are concentrated in Brazil (50%), Columbia (20%), Venezuela (10%), and in the Caribbean (16%) (Antón, et al., 2009). On average, Latin American Afro-descendants–in particular women–have a shorter life expectancy, live in poorer conditions, have lower levels of formal education, and have more limited access to public services than the Latin American population as a whole (Belo and Rangel, 2002). If Afro-descendants in Latin America are such a heterogeneous group and their demographic data present such broad gaps, what are the reasons for grouping such a population into one category? One can assume that alongside a common history, there are similar processes of racial discrimination and a corresponding legal and policy framework that unite Latin American Afro-descendants across national borders. Thus, treating Afro-descendants in Latin America as a group that transcends national borders highlights a clear transnational reference with regard to structures of inequality that is generally overlooked in nation-state-centric approaches.7 Inequalities between Afro-descendants and white Latin Americans cannot be exclusively explained by the disadvantages accumulated during the period 7 Historically, Afro-descendants in Latin America have experienced a common history (“geteilte Geschichte”) in the double meaning of the term as understood by Conrad and Randeria (2002): shared und divided. This means a shared experience as part of an African diaspora in Latin America, but this experience is divided in the narratives of national histories.

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of slavery. Research has successfully shown that in various countries being categorised as non-white still correlates directly with a lower socio-economic status and one’s chances for upward mobility. Consequently, if one statistically controls the usual factors that contribute to inequality such as region, gender, income, and the school education of parents, the differences that remain between social positions in any given society can only be explained by racist adscriptions (Telles, 2003; Costa, 2006).

Afro-descendants in Latin America: regimes of inequalities In the course of the slave trade between the 16th and the 19th century, approximately ten million enslaved Africans were brought to the European colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean to work the plantations and mines. Slavery followed different patterns and models in Latin American countries as well as in different regions within a country. The new historiography on slavery has also demonstrated a considerable importance of individual decisions and interpersonal negotiations for shaping relations between master and slaves (Reis, 1999, 437). Nevertheless, a racial division of societies prevailed during slavery demarking two main groups with different political, legal, and social status: enslaved people, in general blacks, and freedmen, in general whites. Therefore, slavery societies in Latin America functioned predominantly as a society of castes: Social mobility from slave to freedman required complex negotiations (Cardoso, 1962). Social categorisations as white or black, which defined social position in slavery societies, were constructed beyond national borders within interpenetrations between colonialism, slave traffic and transatlantic trade flows. As Góngora-Mera in his genealogy of historical articulations of race and law in Latin America accurately shows, law has functioned since the very beginning of colonisation as transregional linkage for sustaining white supremacy in the colonies: From Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis Noviter Inventis of 1532 (widely considered as the first international law text), law and legal argumentation were instruments to justify colonization and legitimate race-based inequalities, this (almost obsessive) recourse to law is a major feature of the Iberian conquest and colonization of America (Góngora-Mera, 2012, 13).

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In 1804, Haiti was the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery; Brazil was the last in 1888 (Andrews, 2004). In most countries, slavery even survived after national independence. The consolidation of nation-states during the 19th century reflected the influence of scientific racism coming from Europe. The founding fathers of Latin American states made deliberate efforts to “Europeanise”–in biological-racist and cultural terms–their societies by controlling population development and prohibiting Afro-Latin American religious and cultural practices in order to deny an African legacy. As historian Andrews puts it, this period was dominated by a “war on blackness”. In all countries of the region, writers, politicians, and state planners wrestled with the problem of Latin America’s racial inheritance. As firm believers in racial determinism, they had no doubts that the historical trajectories of individuals, nations, and people were irrevocably determined by their “racial” ancestry. [...] The Latin American response to this dilemma was a bold, visionary, and ultimately quixotic effort to transform themselves from racial mixed, predominantly nonwhite societies into white republics populated by Caucasians and their descendants (Andrews, 2004, 118).

This “war on blackness” had profound consequences at the legal level as well as at level of different policies: In line with the dogmas of scientific racism, different governments of independent Latin American states adopted restrictive immigration law and developed “sanitarian” programmes as well as measures aimed to control “interracial” marriage (Andrews, 2004; GóngoraMera, 2012, 20ff ). In the 1930s, a glorification of biological and cultural mixture expressed illustratively in the concept of mestizaje supplanted racist nationalism. The dominant national discourses became marked by a national ideology celebrating a peaceful living together of all groups and traditions from European, indigenous, and African descent. The related emergence of cultural relativism in international cultural anthropology–and the work of Franz Boas especially–had a great influence on discourses on mestizaje in Latin America. Some of the most important inventors of mestizaje ideology have been directly influenced by Boas, among them Gilberto Freyre in Brazil and Fernando Ortíz in Cuba (Hofbauer, 2006). The position of Afro-descendants in the mestizaje discourse is ambivalent. On the one hand, this discourse celebrates the role of Afro-descendants as

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allies of the European colonisers within the process of “civilising” the tropics as well as their importance for the development of mixed national identities. At the same time, this discourse of inclusion signifies the surrender of an Afro-descendent identity. Thus, what is relevant for the mestizaje is no longer their African ancestry, but instead the integration of Afro-descendants into the Brazilian, Cuban, or Columbian nations which represent, accordingly to the mestizaje discourse, a prolongation of European civilisation in the tropics (Costa, 2006). If the discourse on mestizaje functioned as a political programme to assimilate and subordinate cultural differences, it also serves as a model of conviviality. Thus, ethnographic studies in Ecuador (Walsh, 2009), Brazil (Almeida, 2000; Sansone, 2003) and Colombia (Wade, 2005) have demonstrated how this discourse functions as a multi-layered construct that connects different patterns of intercultural coexistence. As an ideology, the mestizaje still carries political resonance. However, since the 1990s, it has been challenged by a shifting international framework and from the presence of new protest actors on the national and international scene. These new developments make a case for the creation of a new pattern of inequality that I call compensatory regime. Already during the 1980s, international organisations shifted their agenda and began to perceive “cultural diversity” as a resource for development and no longer as a problem (Kymlicka, 2007). The discourse on multiculturalism has also entered the discourse of national and local governments in Latin America, a rhetoric that now publicly celebrates the cultural identity of indigenous and Afro-descendants. The role of different cultural and social movements cannot be underestimated in this context. Since the 1990s, the Afro-Latin American movements have undergone an important process of transnationalisation and internal differentiation. Culturally, this has resulted in the rapid spread of so-called “Black Culture” within the imagined space of a “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy, 1993; 2010), which in Latin America includes manifestations such as Reggae, Capoeira, and Hip Hop (Costa, 2011). Politically, the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa represents a milestone. The preparatory and follow-up meetings to the conference made the founding of numerous Afro-Latin American organisations possible, as well as the establishment of important transnational, anti-racist networks. Furthermore, the mobilisation of black

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women and other representatives of internal minorities ensure a pluralisation of the Afro-Latin American movement by bringing the issue of the diversity of black subjects to the forefront (Costa, 2006; Costa, 2010). These new developments have begun to make their way into social policies and new regulatory frameworks that affect the Afro-Latin American population in different countries including protection against discrimination, concession of cultural rights and affirmative policies such as quotas for admission at universities (Olmos, 2010; Anton, et al., 2009; Costa and Gonçalves, 2011). It cannot yet be precisely determined how such new legal and policy frameworks affect structures of inequality. However, since ethnic, racial, and gender prejudices that shape structures of inequality in Latin America have not disappeared, one has to assume, then, that different mechanisms of stratification coexist in the compensatory inequality regime.8 These are: – Class structures that govern the access to goods and desired positions in society according to market economy criteria; – Racial, ethnic, and gender ascriptions that define the access to goods and positions according to social prejudices. – Belonging to a target group of a certain policy that determines a compensatory access to resources.9 8

According to my own definition of inequality regimes above, I should provide a description of convivial forms that are characteristic for each regime. However, this would require ethnohistorical and ethnographic research of different everyday experiences in a variety of countries, a work I am not able to develop. 9 Categories applied for defining Afro-descendants as target group of a compensatory legislation or policy often differ from social categorisations used in daily life. There are different reasons for this discrepancy such as: ii) Contemporary legislation and policy texts tend to privilege ethnic-cultural categories (origin, cultural features, etc.) avoiding racial categorisations prevalent in popular discourses (for a useful overview on the discussion within the European Union, see Barskanmatz, 2011). ii) Since law and policies respond also to transnational dynamics (international conferences, transnational social movements, etc.), they lead often to protect groups not (yet) articulated at the national and local level. The case of Brazilian maroons (“quilombolas”) is elucidative: When the Brazilian constitution of 1988, in line with contemporary international developments, created especial rights for “quilombola” communities; “quilombola” was a historiographical category without clear correspon-

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As mentioned above, my primary objective in this paper is to present social inequalities as a product of interdependencies between different social categorisations as well as a result of transregional entanglements. For this purpose I highlight in table 1 main interdependencies and entanglements found in the four regimes of inequality which have historically encompassed Afro-descendants in Latin America. TABLE 1 Afro-descendants in Latin America: Inequality Regimes, Social Categorisations, Transregional Interdependencies Main stratification/ redistribution categorisations

Main transregional entanglements

Regime

Period

Slavery

until 19th Century

caste

colonialism, international law, slave traffic, triangular trade (Europe, Africa, Americas)

Racist nationalism

from abolition to approx. 1930

racial ascription

international exchange within scientific racism (Europe, Americas)

Mestizo nationalism

1930-1990

class racial, gender ascription

circulation of culturalist theories (Americas)

Compensatory regime

since 1990

class racial, gender ascription, target population

transnational anti-racist alliances (Black Atlantic), international organisations, international law

dence to concrete groups in Brazil. After the implementation of policies benefiting “quilombolas” more than 3,000 communities have rediscovered their “quilombola” origin (Hoffman, 2009; Costa, 2012).

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CONCLUSIONS The approach entangled inequalities developed in this paper is an attempt to highlight and integrate two types of interdependencies usually ignored in inequality research: entanglements between different world regions and interdependencies between various social categorisations that shape social inequalities. For constructing this approach, I have first examined new contributions that have recently studied impacts on social inequalities produced by both transregional entanglements and intersections between different social categorisations. Then, I have combined selected advances in both research fields in a definition of entangled inequalities, which focuses on asymmetric positions of individuals or groups of individuals in a relational (not geographic) context. In order to understand the linkages from which unequal positions arise, it is necessary to have relational units of analysis that are dynamically defined in the process of inquiry itself. In a similar way, the interplay of social categorisations (gender, race, class, ethnicity etc.) cannot be articulated ex-ante in a formula. It can only be studied in the respective specific context. By proposing the concept of inequality regimes, I have tried to coin a dynamic unit of analysis, which enables to take up the interdependencies between social categorisations and between different regions of the world. Moreover, the tracking of different interrelated regimes of inequality over time allows considering the historical construction of inequalities. In the second half of the paper, I examined inequality regimes that have historically encompassed Afro-descendants in Latin America: slavery, racist nationalism, mestizo nationalism, and compensatory regime. Each regime has been shaped by a different set of transregional entanglements. In each regime a specific interplay of social categorisations is at the forefront. During slavery regime, the status of being enslaved or free prevailed, while other ascriptions became secondary. The definition about who belongs to the “caste” of slaves or freedmen was a result of a complex interpenetration between colonial and international law, transatlantic slave traffic, disputes between colonial powers among other transregional entanglements. During the period of racist nationalism, racial categorisations remained crucial for defining positions of individuals and groups of individuals within socio-economic and power hierarchies in Latin America. Scientific racism emerged in the circulation of ideas–especially between Europe and the Amer-

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icas–and was crucial to legitimate a subordinated position occupied by Afrodescendants within these asymmetric structures. The mestizo-nationalism regime, combining nationalist discourses produced in Latin America with new culturalist theories developed at the international level, condemned explicitly racism and positioned the social categorisation “mestizo” at the forefront. This opened for Afro-descendants new possibilities of inserting themselves into national power hierarchies–at least in discursive terms. Consequently, other hierarchies such as gender and class position became more visible. Finally, the compensatory regime emerged as a product of multiple transregional entanglements: pressure of transnational social movements, emergence of new legal protection at global level, policies of international organisation, etc. As a consequence, the position of an Afro-descendant in this regime is made up of a complex combination of diverse categorisations: racial classifications, which cannot be reduced to a black-white duality, class, gender, ethnicity, target groups, etc. Depending on which level of the inequality regime is taken into account, these positions vary: being categorised as ‘dark skinned’, for example, can be advantageous in relation to the access to some policies–e.g., quota. On other levels of the inequality regime–such as discourse, patterns of conviviality–being categorised as non-white is associated with a subordinated position.

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PIERSON, Donald. Negroes in Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1942. PINHO, Patricia. Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia. Durham: Duke University Press 2010. PRIES, Ludger. “Transnationalisierung und soziale Ungleichheit. Konzeptuelle Überlegungen und empirische Befunde aus der Migrationsforschung.” Transnationalisierung sozialer Ungleichheiten. Ed. Peter A. Berger, and Anja Weiß. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2008. 41-64. REIS, José João. “Slaves as agents of history: A note on the new historiography of slavery in Brazil.” Ciência e Cultura 51.5,6 (1999): 437-45. SANSONE, Livio. Blackness without Ethnicity. Constructing Race in Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003. STEWART, Frances. “Crisis Prevention: Tackling Horizontal Inequalities.” Oxford Development Studies, 28.3 (2000): 245-62. — “¿Por qué persisten las desigualdades de grupo? Las trampas de la desigualdad horizontal.” Teoría económica y desigualdad social. Exclusión, desigualdad y democracia. Homenaje a Adolfo Figueroa. Ed. Félix Jiménez. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la PUC 2010. 269-298. STEWART, Frances, Graham BROWN, and Luca MANCINI. “Why Horizontal Inequalities Matter: Some Implications for Measurement.” CRISE Working Paper, 19, University of Oxford 2005. TELLES, Edward Eric. Racismo à brasileira: Uma nova perspectiva sociológica. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará 2003. THORP, Rosemary, and Maritza PAREDES. Ethnicity and the Persistence of Inequality. The Case of Peru. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2010. WADE, Peter. “Rethinking mestizaje: Ideology and lived experience.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 37.2 (2005): 239-57. WAGLEY, Charles. Race and Class in Rural Brazil. Paris: Unesco 1952. WALSH, Catherine. Interculturalidad, estado, sociedad: luchas (de) coloniales de nuestra época. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar 2009. WEIß, Anja. “The Transnationalization of Social Inequality. Conceptualising Social Positions on a World Scale.” Current Sociology, 53.4 (2005): 707-28.

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PERFORMANCES OF IDENTIFICATIONS

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INTERDEPENDENCIES OF CLASS, ETHNICITY AND GENDER IN THE POSTEMANCIPATION SOCIETIES OF MARTINIQUE AND CUBA Ulrike Schmieder

ABSTRACT This article explains comparatively, basing its findings on archival sources, the varying entanglements of class, ethnicity and gender in the slave societies in Martinique and Cuba, as well as their transformations after emancipation. Although the former slaves of both islands had to develop new livelihood strategies, reconstruct their families, resist political and cultural repression by plantation owners, colonial state and Church, the lives of former slaves showed remarkable differences on the two islands because of the different ethnic composition of the labour force in the sugar economy and of the island population in general, varying economical conjunctures in the moment of abolition and diverging political frameworks, particularly the abolition of slavery in Cuba in context of the Independence movement.

INTRODUCTION The first labour force in the French colony Martinique consisted of so called engagés, white contract labourers, who produced tobacco. The sugar revolution on the island began in the 1640s, and the growing need of workers was met by the introduction of African slaves. The Haitian Revolution (17911804) ended slavery and the colonial status of that island and the sugar production for the world market of the world’s most important producer. Sugar production on Martinique should compensate the loss. It grew, but not to the same degree as the more successful Cuban competitor. As Martinique was occupied by British troops between 1794 and 1802, the first abolition of slavery (1794 by the French convent, revoked by Napoleon in 1802) did not come into force in Martinique. The transatlantic slave trade to Martinique, forbidden since 1815-1818, ceased effectively in 1831 (Tomich, 1990, 52-57; Jennings, 2000, 7-32). The abolition of slavery was declared on April 27th, 1848, by the French Revolutionary Government of 1848, but should come into effect only two months after its proclamation

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in every colony. An insurrection on Martinique in May 1848 obliged the Governor to end slavery on May 23rd, 1848, before the abolition decree had arrived in the colony (Lara, 2005, 21-124; Schmidt, 2009, 126-130; Pago, 2006). Martinique remained French colony until 1946, then, its status was changed to “Overseas Department”. The slaves in Cuba produced sugar, coffee and tobacco on small and medium-sized farms in modest quantities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Slaves also worked in stock-farming, mining, urban crafts and the ports. The Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 brought a sugar boom to Cuba whose production compensated for the loss of Saint-Domingue sugar cane on the world market. This economic growth was based on the massive import of African slaves. Treaties with Britain about the abolition of the transatlantic slave of 1817 and 1835 did not end this trade. The last slave ships arrived at the island probably in 1873 (Zeuske, 2004, 395). In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Cuban sugar economy was industrialised and mechanised. During the Ten Years’ War of 1868-1878 Cuban patriots had declared the abolition of slavery in 1869, under the condition that the freedmen served the Cuban army as helpers or soldiers. Although the patriots lost the war the former slaves who served in the Cuban troops were freed by the Treaty of Zanjón. And the Spanish army had also employed slaves and freed them after military service (Scott, 1985, 114-115). In the East of Cuba the destruction of plantations had ruined many plantation owners who could not reconstruct the plantation system after war (Zeuske, 2004, 399-454). In Spain an influential abolitionist movement tried to end slavery: in 1868 members of this movement became part of the liberal government. The result was the free womb law of Cuba (1870) and the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico (1873) (Schmidt-Nowara, 1999, 139-160). Although the power of the conservatives was restored, in 1880 the law of patronato prepared the end of slavery. It defined a transitional labour regime between slavery and freedom as the British apprenticeship had done, but with harsher regulations. Spain finally abolished slavery in 1886 (Scott, 1985, 121-171). My research focuses on the social and cultural transformations in Cuba and Martinique after the abolitions of slavery in 1848 and 18861 that means 1

My project is part of the project “Post-Slavery: Comparing the Caribbean and Africa” at the Leibniz University of Hanover that investigates the British, Danish, French and Spanish Caribbean, French and British West Africa as well as South Africa.

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the first twenty years or one generation after the slave emancipation. I examine the agency that former slaves exerted in the processes of transforming labour systems and reorganising gender relations in the post-slavery period. The former slaves were reacting to the attempts of planters, the colonial state, the church, and missionaries to erase African religion and culture and to impose in their place capitalist working morals as well as the 19th-century west-European patriarchal model of gender. I am interested in exploring how the different categorisations of class, “race”/ethnicity, and gender were reconstructed as well as how new forms of identity and belonging were created during these struggles.

CLASS Commonalities in Cuba and Martinique Modern slavery in the Caribbean was primarily a system of production, namely a plantation economy based on slave labour. Marxist historians spoke of a producer class of big landowners and slaveholders as well as a merchant class in Cuban slave society (Moreno, 1976, 48, 59-62), or of a master class as the ruling class in the Southern United States (Genovese, 1965). They defined slave societies in the Americas as pre-capitalist. Genovese conceived slave revolts following the Haitian Revolution as class struggle and as part of the “trans-Atlantic bourgeois-democratic revolutions” which enforced the “transition from seigneuralism to capitalism” (Genovese, 1979, XIII-XXIV, 82-125). In “Was the plantation slave a proletarian?” Mintz denies the question he raises rhetorically, but insists on the common analysis of proletarian and modern slave labour as both having developed as part of the capitalist world economy (Mintz, 1978). This idea has infused the ground common to most current studies on slavery. Slavery in the European overseas colonies was not only compatible with but was also necessarily interlinked with the development of a global market economy. And the “second slavery” of the 19th century (Tomich and Zeuske, 2008), the mass slavery on Cuban “sugar factories in the field” and the coffee fazendas in Brazil, was a laboratory of technological modernity and new forms of labour organisation. Contemporary historians of slavery use the term class for fieldworkers after the abolition of slavery (Scott, 1985, 237), for the “planter” class

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(Burnard, 2011), or they do not speak of class at all. Zeuske refers to a class of field slaves as well as a class of urban slaves; he also defines slaves as having been a means of capital accumulation for big slave owners or of subsistence for small slaveholders (Zeuske, 2004, 315-319). But neither the master class nor the slave class were homogenous groups that had common interests; both had internal hierarchies: Big plantation owners with hundreds of slave had, of course, more economic power, political and social influence than urban settlers with one or two slaves. The situation of a slave craftsman, born in the Caribbean, speaking the language of his master and knowing the rules of colonial society, was different to a recently imported African who did not understand Spanish or French and had to adapt to a difficult strange environment. With respect to Spanish America the colonial society was often described as a system of castes (castas, where the status of a person lifelong depended on the juridical categorisation of her ethnic origin) which developed slowly into a system of social classes (where the status of a person depended on her economical position and could change; about the historiographical development: Potthast, 1999, 116-121). With reference to the Caribbean the notion “caste” is used in historical sources as synonym for class belonging connected with skin colour (referring to the castes of white slave-owners, black slaves, coloured free people), but it is very seldom employed in the last decades’ academic historiography on Caribbean slavery. I conceive the relationship between master and slave in Caribbean plantation societies as a particularly harsh “relation of domination”, but not, as Patterson (1982, 1) has it, in the sense of total power of the master and total powerlessness of the slave. In slave societies the members of the dominated class were defined as property (chattel) of the dominating class. Slaves were commodities that could be bought and sold. They were forced by physical violence to produce without pay goods for the world market. In the plantation societies of Martinique and Cuba (as in Barbados, Jamaica or Brazil) field work was so hard that it destroyed the slaves physically, and their natural reproduction was impossible (Moitt, 2001, 89-99; Zeuske, 2004, 312314; Bergad, 2007, 96-131). Slavery did not only mean devastating economic exploitation: as property, slaves were also forced to serve the slaveholder for non-economic purposes, such as sexual services. But slaves formed their own “slave cultures” (Palmié, 1995) and were protagonists of slave economies (Hall and Mintz, 1960; Berlin and Morgan, 1991). The 19th century slave

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rebellions in the British West Indies were “proto-peasant revolts” (Craton, 1979). After abolition the interests of planter aristocracy and freedmen remained irreconcilable. The former masters wanted the former slaves to continue to work on plantations for a salary below that of the actual level of reproduction. They blocked access to land, to education, to full citizens’ rights for the freedmen. The former slaves strove for an independent economic existence, for a rise in social status, and for political rights.

Differences between Martinique and Cuba After the abolition of slavery in 1848 the functionaries of the French Republic obliged the former slaves of Martinique to continue field labour on plantations, under conditions that were favourable for planters, unfavourable for workers, instead of distributing the plantation land among the labourers as the nouveaux libres had expected (Élisabeth, 1999, 313). The Director of the Interior explained to the freed people that now they had to work and to marry in order to earn their way into Paradise (Cottias, 2002, 321). The Republican Government tried to bind former slaves to the plantations by labour contracts between the landowner and the community of field hands. The labourers were to be paid with a share of the cultivated products’ output. Former slaves would be allowed to stay in their houses on the plantation ground only if they worked for their former master; this was despite the fact that they had built their houses and believed they belonged to them (Tomich, 1995, 245-246). Resistance to the new labour system began immediately following emancipation, in 1848. The Commissaire Générale de la République Perrinon expelled the male and female fieldworkers in Lamentin from their houses on plantation land because they had refused to continue working. In reaction, they destroyed the houses.2 Slave labour was therefore not replaced by a free wage labour system or by independent farming, but by compulsory labour.

2

CAOM (Centre des Archives d´Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence), Amérique carton 8, Esclavage 1848-1849, Répression d´émeutes de 1848 à la Martinique: Destruction de cases d´habitation (habitation Marchet, undated).

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The Republican Labour Courts (1848-1852) decided more often in favour of the planters than the field workers (Cottias, 2004); field workers could be punished for reasons such as that they “troubled the work gangs.”3 The Republican Government gave full civil and political rights to the freedmen including the right to vote. But Afro-Caribbean people who refused to work according to the planters’ conditions were sentenced to do forced labour. Under the regime of Napoleon III suffrage of freedmen was cancelled. Governor Gueydon obliged former slaves by such measures as vagrancy laws,4 a work book system, and a head tax to continue to work on plantations (Renard, 1993). Wages were held down by introducing cheap African and East Indian contract workers (Northrup, 2000). The free primary schools introduced by the Republic became subject to high charges in 1853,5 which reduced the number of children of farm workers who went to public schools.6 In resistance to this policy, illegal private schools for fieldworkers’ children mushroomed.7 The post-slavery situation in Cuba was different to that of Martinique. Plantation owners wanted to employ labour as cheaply as possible and to exclude former slaves from political power and social ascendance; but it was not as urgent as in Martinique to coerce former slaves to work for them. The modern Cuban sugar mills needed fewer workers and large tracts of the arable land were placed under sugar cane. Poor Spanish immigrants came to work in Cuban agriculture as seasonal or permanent labourers (Bergad, 1984-1985). Chinese contract workers, introduced to Cuba to replace the Africans in the 1870s (Hu-Dehart, 1993), could also be hired for field labour. Many unemployed African-Cubans could not find a piece of land to 3 CAOM, FM, SG, Martinique, carton 164, dossier 1499, report 6.7.1849, Pièce D. Matière penale. Jugemens rendus par les huit jurys cantonaux, Canton de Mouillage, case 11: five female and two male fieldworkers were fined for this delict. 4 CAOM, FM, Géneralités: Travail, Martinique/ Guadeloupe carton 145, dossier 1227. Martinique: Condemned persons for “vagrancy”: Trimester 1/1853: 177, Trimester 3/1856: 1.514. 5 AFICP (Archives des Frères de l´Instruction Chrétienne de Ploërmel, Rome); 155-06024. Governor of Martinique, Arrêté sur le régime des écoles publiques, 21.11.1853. 6 AFICP, 189-02-058, Letter of the Director of the Interior to the Governor of Martinique, Fort-de-France, 9.2.1855: 1853: 5806, 1854: 2375 pupils. 7 AFICP, 189-01-027 Arrêté sur la police des Ecoles privées, 20.3.1854. 189-02-031 Letter of the Governor of Martinique to the Minister of the Marine and the Colonies, Fort-deFrance, 27.3.1854.

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live on or a job in town, where employers preferred Spanish immigrants. These former slaves’ only prospect was to live as itinerant fieldworkers whose affirmation of their freedom was to take task work instead of being tied to a contract for a longer period. Plantation owners tried to restrict this mobility by indebting their workers to the plantation store (Scott, 1985, 229-235). After the successful War of Independence (1895-1898) the situation changed radically. In Republican Cuba colonial forms of repression against workers were discarded. The pension and the status of patriotic veterans of the War allowed some former slaves, or at least their sons, to buy land or to get a job in the lower levels of the public service, and from 1901 on all white and black Cuban men could vote (Zeuske, 2005, 188-193).

“RACE”/ETHNICITY Biological races do not exist. But racist theories, developed reputedly on the basis of “scientific”, empirical based classification during the era of Enlightenment, divided humanity in a small number of groups (European/African/ Asian/Amerindian, “white”/“black”/“yellow”/“red”) called “races” with supposed common hereditary biological characteristics (skin colour, hair form, physiognomy) connected with supposed common hereditary intellectual and moral traits and constructed an alleged hereditary superiority of European or “Caucasian” “white” people. “Ethnicity” refers to groups with a (presumed) common historical origin, language and culture. European colonisers used to order colonised and enslaved people of another “race” into subcategories, ethnic groups, “tribes” or “peoples” and attribute them also collective features. But Africans in the New World also voluntarily attached themselves to ethnic groups (naciones) defined on the basis of shared religious believe and languages of African origin and created thus new forms of belonging.

Commonalities in Cuba and Martinique In the first centuries of European dominance in the Caribbean the enslavement of Africans was justified by their paganism, conceived of as a hereditary stigma. The presumed connection of skin colour (noir/nègre–black, de couleur/mûlatre–coloured, blanc–white in Martinique; moreno/negro–black,

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pardo/mulato–coloured, blanco–white in Cuba) to a descending order of intellectual and moral traits developed in parallel with plantation slavery. In the 19th century racism became the dominant ideology. Fear of Africans and racist oppression grew in both islands after the successful slave revolution of Haiti, with the slave revolts of 1789, 1800 and 1811 in Martinique being influenced by the French and Haitian revolutions (Geggus, 1996), as were the insurrections of slaves 1795, 96, 98, 1802, 03, 05, 06, 1811-12 and the rebellion of Aponte 1812 (free Afro-Cubans and slaves) in Cuba (Ferrer, 2009, 228, 237). Racial prejudice continued to be accompanied by condemnation of the “black heathens”, whose religions were defined as “paganism” and “sorcery”. Conversion to Christianity was desired to secure obedience and the acceptance of poverty. Brother Marcellin of the Educational Order of the Frères de Ploërmel complained about the “bad behaviour” and “superstitions” of the black men to whom he taught Christianity, and about the use of amulets as protection against different dangers. He wanted to tear out this African customs as one would tear out “weeds”8. In 1896 some Afro-Cuban men and women, so called individuos de color, were persecuted for illegal association. They had gathered to perform an act of ñañigismo, a practice of the secret religious society of Abakúa, the origins of which lay in the carabalí culture on the Calabar Coast in West Africa. The accused said that they had not practiced witchcraft but had visited a traditional healer.9 These cases show the long persistence of the image of Africans as pagans and also that paganism was connected with skin colour. Racism meant that all Afro-Cubans were described as blacks according to common racist stereotypes, and that specific corporal, moral and intellectual characteristics (strength or weakness, contumacy or submissiveness, diligence or idleness etc.) were assigned to specific African ethnic groups (congo, lucumí, carabalí) as ‘knowledge’ that could be deployed to dominate them (Zeuske, 2004, 281, 329). The self-attribution of slaves and their attribution by others to an ethnic group could differ and changed permanently.

8

AFICP, 172-04-013, F. Marcellin to J.M. de la Mennais, Fort-Royal, 21.1.1844. ARNAC (Archivo Nacional de Cuba), Audiencia de La Habana, Sala de lo Criminal, Sección Primera. 554-4 Juzgado de 1a. Instancia e instrucción del Distrito del Pilar. “Contra el Moreno José Perez del Castillo y seis individuos por Asociacion ilicita” 27.5.1896. 9

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The older historiography proposed a rapid creolisation process of Africans in the Americas and the fast disappearance of African heritage. Recent research insists, however, that slave and freedmen cultures were strongly influenced by African cultures and religions.10 Archival historical findings show an even more complex reality: African cultures were transported to the Americas, maintained, and transformed by contact with European and Amerindian cultures, which in turn were modified by the encounter with Africans. The empirical problem posed is: one can identify African cultural traits in historical or actual phenomena, like the Yoruba heritage in the Cuban Santería, but the individual called María or José lucumí (as the Yoruba were named in Cuba) was perhaps not of West African Yoruba origin. He might have been transported through the Yoruban region or received this name from a dead slave to conceal the persistence of the forbidden slave trade. The class-oriented arguments about the practices of slave resistance have been replaced by explanations, which base themselves on African culture (Laviña and Ruiz-Penado, 2006; Thompson, 2006). Many slave rebellions were led by Africans or influenced by African military experiences and political ideas. Africans did not need European inspirations to resist. But Africanness cannot explain everything. There were also slave revolts led by Creole slaves11, who were born in the Caribbean and influenced by its hybrid European-African culture. Afro-Spanish Americans fought in the Atlantic independence revolutions to gain personal and collective freedom, using liberal ideas to demand equal citizenship (Ghachem, 2003; Blanchard, 2008; Ferrer, 1999). Therefore explanations of the causes and character of slave resistance should look for social conflicts and political, cultural and religious influences from Africa and Europe.

10

Overview: Hatzky, 2010. Pro creolisation: Frazier, 1939; Ortiz, 1940/1963 (“transculturación”); Mintz and Price, 1976. “Africa in America”: Herskovits, 1941; Thornton, 1992; Lovejoy, 1997; Midlo Hall, 2005. 11 Heumann, 2011, examples: African led rebellions: 1733/34 St. John, 1739 South Carolina, 1760 Jamaica, 1763 Berbice, 1835 Bahia. Creole led rebellions: 1800 Richmond, 1812, 1844 Cuba, 1816 Barbados, 1831 Jamaica.

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Differences between Cuba and Martinique About 217,000 slaves were brought to Martinique between the 17th and the 19th century.12 The high percentage of black and coloured inhabitants of the French Caribbean islands led the white minority to fear rebellions. The Code Noir (1685) stipulated harsh physical and death penalties for resisting slaves (Sala-Moulins, 2007, 156-167). Manumissions were made more and more difficult in order to hold down the number of free coloured persons (Moitt, 2001, 151-155). The liberal government of 1830 abolished the tax on manumissions and the restrictions of civil rights of free coloured people, but excluded most free coloured men from voting by putting in place an electoral law with a high census qualification to vote (Jennings, 2000, 32-36). Thus, direct racist exclusion which contradicted the political ideas of this Government was omitted, but the political hegemony of white planters was guaranteed. Brother Ambroise Le Haiguet, head of the Frères de Plöermel in Martinique, described in 1841 the social and ethnic structure of Martinican Society during slavery: There are three castes or classes of men: 1) the colons13, noblemen, 2) the free people of colour and 3) the slaves. The colons or noblemen are people without faith and law and occupy the places of honour and superiority, as the nobles in France before, but [they are–the author] much more godless. They are called masters of plantations and own black slaves. Those [the slaves] are considered and treated by their masters as brutes without soul. [The masters] even refuse that one teaches them the catechism and even that one speaks to them about religion because of reasons that the plume refuses to write down.14

12 9.5.2011, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces. They came from the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra and West-Central Africa, to a lesser extent from Senegambia and the Gold Coast (Eltis, 1999). In the 17th century “Angolas” (Bantu speaking people from the Kingdom of Angola), “Sénégals” (Wolof, Serere, Bambara) and “Aradas” (slaves sold by the king of Ardres) came to the French Caribbean. Most slaves who came to Martinique in the 18th century were “Aradas” from the “Slave Coast”, Yoruba of the kingdom of Oyo or Mahis, followed by Bantu speaking people from the Congo. The majority of slaves imported in the 19th century to the French islands were Ibos, “Congos” and, above all, Yoruba (Gautier, 1985, 37). 13 (Colonial) “settlers”, used for the landowning whites. 14 AFICP. F. Ambroise Le Haiguet, Correspondance Antilles, 1841-1852. Letter of F. Ambroise to F. Theodose, 7.7.1841.

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According to Brother Ambroise the free coloured people were the only group who attended the schools of the Friars. The whites did not intermingle with them; in their turn, free coloured people would leave any class into which slaves entered. Of the 1500 children in the schools of the Friars only 100 were of legitimate birth, as free coloured women aspired to have a child by a white man. The slaves were forbidden to marry by their masters. The free coloured people and the slaves were well disposed to becoming devout Christians, but the local priests were more interested in becoming rich and maintaining good relations with the colons than in working as missionaries.15 The Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny maintained a boarding school for the daughters of the white planters in St. Pierre; coloured girls were not admitted. When in 1846 the Government demanded that the sisters accept coloured girls16 the head of the Sœurs in Martinique, Sr. Onésime Lefevre, refused to comply. She argued that as soon as even one coloured girl entered the boarding school all white pupils would withdraw. Under the Republican Government Sr. Onésime was forced to accept coloured pupils,17 but she contrived to exclude the majority of coloured girls by only receiving legitimate children.18 After 1848 the decrees on compulsory labour and exclusion from education stood in clear contrast to the supposed freedom of agency of Afro-Martinican men as free citizens. Although they were not named “nègre” or “mûlatre” in official documents, “né en Afrique” was also a clear marker. In 1870 the Republican Government restored political rights to Afro-Martinican men; women only gained the franchise in 1945. As there were very few white workers in the fields in Martinique, between 1852 and 1870 the vagrancy laws that forced workers to labour on plantations were used exclusively against Afro-Martinican descendants of former 15

Ibid. AJSC (Archives de Sœurs de St. Joseph, Paris), 5 A a 2.4, Ministère de la Marine, Pièces ministérielles d´interêt général 1839-1845, 15, 5.02.1846, Minister Baron Mackau to the Superior General of the Sœurs de St. Joseph. 17 Resistance of Mère Onésime to accept coloured girls at the boarding school: AJSC, Martinique: 2 A h 5, 64, 9.7.1846, 68, 20.08.1846, 69, 25.8.1846, 71, 19.10.1846, 72, 27.10.1846, 76, 3.1.1847, 78, 26.1.1847. Sr. Onésime gives up her position: ASJC, Martinique: 2 A h 5, 95bis, 19.4.1848. 18 ASJC, Martinique: 2 A h 6, Letters of Victor Schœlcher to Anne-Marie Javouhey (20.9.1849 and undated) complain about that restriction. 16

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slaves as well as African and East Indian contract workers, men and women alike. The repression had a classist and a racist bias, it targeted non-white landless fieldworkers. The strongest form of resistance offered by labourers was the armed riot that included plundering planters’ houses and setting sugar cane fields on fire. Violent resistance took place in May 1848, in a series of arson of plantations 1859-186119 and in the Insurrection of the South in 1870 (Pago, 2011). The causes of the latter were dissatisfaction about labour coercion and racial discrimination. The immediate occasion was the Lubin affair. Léopold Lubin, an African-Martinican, was condemned to jail and fined for inflicting bodily harm on a white man, although an injury this white man had previously done to him had not been prosecuted. The rebellion of former slaves and African immigrants began on September 22, after the Proclamation of the Third Republic which coincided with the climax of the Lubin affair and seemed to weaken colonial rule. Some whites were killed, and plantations were set on fire and plundered. On 26 September the rebellion was suppressed. Leaders were executed, and many people, including women, were condemned to banishment in Guyana.20 Between 1780 and 1873, at least 850,000 African men and women were displaced and sent as slaves to Cuba (Zeuske and Zeuske, 1998, 27621). During the mass slavery of the 19th century, racism in Cuba became stronger. The white elite feared the social and political ambitions of the growing number of free coloured people–who had their own militias and owned land and slaves–and they feared “africanisation” of the island due to the high number of imported slaves (Zeuske, 2004, 208-210). The immigration of white labourers was promoted and discriminating laws sharpened. Free coloured men were forbidden to carry arms or to work as plantation administrators. They had to apply for a work license and could not become priests, lawyers or doctors. In 1840 racist segregation in schools became law (Paquette, 1988, 119-121). In reaction to a series of slave uprisings (García, 2003) and the 19

CAOM, FM, SG, Martinique, carton 12, dossier 119. CAOM, Greffes, Cour d´Assises, Martinique; Fort-de-France, DPPC GR 915 (18681872), 19.08.1870, Criminal case against Léopold Lubin. Krakovitch, 1985; Pago, 2008. 21 The main groups were “Lucumí” (Yoruba): from the Bight of Benin, Mandinga from North West Africa, Congo: Bantu speaking groups from the old kingdom of Congo, Carabalí: from the Calabar Coast, Gangá: from Sierra Leone and Northern Liberia, Ararás: Fon and Ewe from the kingdom of Adres, later a part of Dahomey. The notions refer to a combination of culture, state, region, and language (Zeuske and Zeuske, 1998, 305-307). 20

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anti-colonial and anti-slavery conspiracy of La Escalera of 1843/1844, the Spanish state used brutal measures against slaves, free coloured people and white Cuban abolitionists to extinguish the resistance to slavery, white dominance and colonial order (Paquette, 1988, 209-266). Cuba’s vagrancy laws were tightened after the end of the Ten Years’ War (1868-78), when the devastation of wrought by the war and an economic crisis led to a high number of unemployed young men wandering the island in search of a means of survival, some uniting in criminal gangs. After abolition, plantation owners aspired to have still more restrictive vagrancy laws imposed, but the colonial administration council preferred immigration as a solution to the labour shortage (Scott, 1985, 218-221; Scott, 1994). In contrast to Martinique, the decree against vagrancy of 1879 was directed against white (Cuban, Spanish and Canarian), Afro-Cuban and Chinese labourers who had worked together on Cuban plantations, a fact that strengthened social contacts between these groups. This law was in response to the fear that all Cubans could unite to fight for independence from Spain, but it also reflected the wish to throw unruly elements out of towns, rather than to force anyone into field labour. And, whereas men and women were the target of vagrancy law in Martinique, in Cuba those laws were nearly exclusively used against men.22 Following abolition, Afro-Cuban organisations succeeded in having the use of the words moreno and pardo in official documents forbidden in 1893; but this prohibition was not immediately practised and the notaries resorted to noting Afro-Cubans–whose parents usually were not married–as s.o.a., i.e. sin otro apellido (“without second surname”, Zeuske, 2002). Afro-Cuban men used their participation in the wars for independence from Spain to gain political rights in 1901, though women gained the right to vote only from 1933 onwards. With the U.S.-interventions of 1898-1902 and 1906-1909 racial segregation in Cuba worsened. In 1912, an insurrection of the prohibited Independent Party of Colour directed against racist discrimination in the labour market and the public service was beaten down with a massacre (Helg, 1991). 22 ARNAC: vol. 29 of the “Miscelánea de Expedientes” (MdE): 29 “Dones” (probable whites), 8 morenos, 10 pardos, 1 asiático, all men with the exception of one black prostitute, were accused of vagrancy (legajo 4331, Aa mentions the respective Royal decree, 17.10.1879). ARNAC, MdE, 4315 E, Attachment, 18.06.1889 (enlists cases of vagrancy): 47 persons, 5 morenos, 19 pardos, all other got the title Don and where supposedly white.

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GENDER Commonalities in Cuba and Martinique Gender, the socially constructed and culturally performed range of behaviours attached to sexual differences, played a crucial role in slave and postslavery societies.23 Racialised and gendered forms of discrimination against slaves were interwoven. The ruthless exploitation of slave women was justified by assigning them the role of sexless “beasts of burden” instead of regarding them as the delicate sex. To be a slave woman meant to be exploited as unpaid labourer, sexual object, and producer of slave children. All coloured women were liable to be seen as prostitutes who seduced white men. Men, meanwhile, were also denied true manhood connected with rationality, and instead they were seen as manifesting persistent childishness. As the supposed lack of reason was combined with physical strength, African men were defined as dangerous animals to be controlled only by harsh physical penalties. To be a slave man meant to be prevented from being the head of family and to be excluded from the mobility and autonomy associated with masculinity in most European and African societies. In the post-slavery period, church and state propagated West-European middle-class gender ideology: men should marry and provide for, protect, and govern their wives and children; women should marry, obey and become Christian homemakers and mothers. But male former slaves were not paid wages that would allow them to maintain a family and they did not have access to enough land to become independent farmers. Women were expected to continue to work in the fields, or as domestics in households belonging to others and without their own household. These contradictory demands were as unattainable for Afro-Caribbean men and women as they were for Europe’s lower classes. The former slaves often did not act according to these norms, but followed the logic of their actual social situation and their own cultural practices. For this they were condemned morally by the white elites and colonial authorities. When Afro-Caribbean men wandered from plantation to planta23

The historiography of slavery began to make visible slave women in the 1980s and to look at gender relations in (post)slavery societies in the 1990s (Gautier 1985; Bush 1990; Shepherd, Brereton, and Bailey, 1995; Moitt, 2001; Paton and Scully, 2005; Cottias, 2005).

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tion looking for the best conditions–an economically reasonable behaviour–they were perceived as vagabonds. When Afro-Caribbean women preferred not to marry but to maintain their economic independence and to raise their children in a household of different female generations, they were perceived as a danger to the social order. When Afro-Caribbean women used a relation with a white man to promote the social advancement of their children they were defined as “loose women”, although “whitening” was a reasonable strategy in a society where class and “race” differences overlapped. When women participated in the social unrests in Martinique in 1848 and 187024 and when they joined the camps of Cuban guerrillas fighting for independence (Prados-Terreira, 71-73, 126-131), this agency was considered as transgressive of a woman’s role, although the women had good reasons to fight against labour coercion and political repression. After emancipation former slaves sought to (re)construct their families. Enslaved women in Martinique had often objected to marriage as they did not want to have a husband as one more master who would demand obedience (Cottias, 2008, 194). Immediately after abolition marriage rates rose sharply, and couples of long standing legitimised their relations.25 Presumably they did so because marriage confirmed their status as free people whose couple and family ties could not be destroyed by an arbitrary master. But some years later the number of marriages declined considerably.26 Long-term partnerships or matrifocal families (often of three generations of women, sometimes in combination with visiting unions between younger women and men) were more common among Afro-Martinicans than formal marriages. Economic conditions did not allow them to live as breadwinner and housewife. Some research questions have not yet been answered: Were Afro-Martinicans not convinced of the validity of Christian concepts of morality and instead wanted to maintain freedom in their partnerships? Was it the women or the men who decided not to marry? Court records include

24

CAOM, FM SG Amérique, 8 (note 1): “Pillage en bande armée,” habitation Dérivery (Rivière Salée), 27.05.1848: two female participants. Pago (2008). 25 The marriage quota in Martinique 1835-1844 was 1.9 of 1000, 1845-1854 it was 10.6 of 1000; Cottias, 2002, 332; AFICP: 173-02-082, Fort-de-France, 26.8.1849, F. Libère to J.M. de la Mennais. 26 The marriage quota in Martinique 1855-1866 was 4.9 of 1000, 1877-1881 it was 3.4 of 1000; Cottias, 2002, 332.

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cases of sexual and domestic violence of Afro-Caribbean men against their female partners (Schmieder, 2011, 133-134). Was that a reason not to marry? In Cuba more slaves than argued previously lived in legal nuclear families, for instance in Bejucal (Perera and Meriño, 2006, 139-188). But with mass slavery the number of slave marriages declined27 and on many plantations there was a high surplus of male slaves (Schmieder, 2010, 169-170). After individual manumissions or after abolition some slave couples legalised their relations and fathers recognised their children (Perera and Meriño, 2006, 162-188; Morrison, 2007). But many of the itinerant Afro-Cuban workers maintained only visiting unions with several different women, as did the famous former maroon Estebán Montejo (Barnet, 1993). The family centred in women. But we know as little in the case of Cuba as we do of Martinique about the conflicts in gender relations, about men’s roles as father, uncle and son, and about conflicts between generations.

Differences between Cuba and Martinique The gender-specific labour division changed more radically in Cuba than in Martinique. In Cuba more women than men left the cane fields, although this depended on regional differences. In Matanzas, the province with the biggest sugar plantations, the opportunity to own land being unlikely, more former slaves, including women, stayed on the cane fields. Most Afro-Cuban smallholders and colonos lived in the Eastern province of Santiago de Cuba, which had never been completely dominated by sugar mills, and the central province of Santa Clara lay in between these extremes (Bergad, 1990, 284285; Scott, 1985, 259-264). Men and women developed gender-specific strategies to achieve liberation and livelihood after emancipation. Women bought their freedom (and the freedom of their children), the means coming from their own economic activities, particularly from selling the products of their kitchen gardens. They would also go to the next town where they would buy a house with a garden or field from which they could produce food for local markets. In

27

According to Barcía (2003, 75) 1841 29%, 1846 36%, 1861 20% and 1870 15% of the slaves were married.

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towns, women also worked as washerwomen, domestic servants, small traders or seamstresses. Men tried to gain freedom, full citizenship, and the means for buying land through military service, which brought payment and contacts with a clientele. The “male” Republic would later forget the pioneering role of women in gaining freedom for their families (Balboa, 2000, 182; Zeuske, 2007, 29, 33; Zeuske, 2005, 183-188).

CLASS, “RACE”/ETHNICITY AND GENDER IN COURT FILES For my research I use a micro historical approach looking at the individual and collective agency of former slaves. Court files are one important source to study the conflicts of the post-emancipation society and to dig out parts of life stories of former slaves. The documents reveal the interdependences between class, race, and gender which in practise, of course, cannot be studied apart as I presented these categorisations in this paper in order to analyse them systematically. In 1849, Alexandre Alligal, 44 years old and a cultivateur, who was born in Africa and lived in Trinité, was condemned to three years’ imprisonment. He was accused of having incited the workers of the plantations Pothuau and Beauséjour to rise up in an armed rebellion on May 4th and 5th, 1849 in Bourg de Trinité, and of having instigated hatred against whites. Along with him, among others, one Fermin, aged 15 and a domestique who was born in Trinité, was sentenced to two years in prison, for having beaten a policeman on the nose. Zelie, aged 35, a blanchisseuse, born in Africa, also was convicted of having instigated the labourers of the plantation Beauséjour into rebellion; she was sent to prison for a period of six months. Pierre Marie-Louise, aged 40, a cultivateur born in Trinité, was locked up for two years for having said amongst others: “I want the head of a Constable or a Captain; I am a nègre capable to burn all plantations”.28 Here, African and Creole, island-born Afro-Martinicans of different professions, including a woman (who had a female profession, but did not behave as somebody of “the weaker sex”), all of them former slaves, joined together to rebel against their white ex-masters and plantations owners and

28

CAOM, DPPC Greffes, Cour d’Assises, St. Pierre: 1849-1851: 924, 22.09.1849.

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the colonial authorities. Here, the social conflict superimposes itself on all internal differences among the former slaves: labourers fight against plantation owners and state authorities. In the Provincial Archive of Matanzas we find the criminal case against Benito criollo, patrocinado moreno and others, because of bodily harm with fatal consequences against José Dolores macúa, another patrocinado, described as old black man. The files date from 1882 and 1883, but the crime took place in 1880 when the involved persons still had been slaves. The events developed on the ingenio (sugar mill) “Conquista” of Don Francisco Fernández de Piloto in Guanajayabo. The first instance court was in Cárdenas, the last sentence came from the Audiencia de la Habana. José Dolores macúa had been assaulted by his comrades Benito, Andrés, Felipe, Laureano, José, Nazario (all morenos) and the pardo Ramón, because he had not participated in a rebellion after a collective punishment. The other slaves had tried to kill the white mayoral Don Francisco Suárez who had them castigated permanently without any reason and had not given them any free day. The immediate occasion was that the overseer had beaten them in the early morning after they had started their work. During the assault the mayoral escaped, shot at the slaves and hurt the slave Manuel criollo, the leader of the revolt. The rural police ended the battle. After these events the slaves including the injured José Dolores were put in the block, lashed and ordered to work in chains. The assaulting slaves were condemned to eight years in jail and to pay compensation to the owner of the former slave José Dolores.29 Here we have a case where on first sight the fronts of class and “race” are clear. Black and coloured slaves revolted against whites, especially a cruel white overseer. But then, as they did not succeed to kill the hated overseer, they had wreaked their anger on an old slave who was too tired to resist violently. Their conviction is nevertheless doubtful as the hurt José Dolores supposedly had not died if he had not been put in the block and had rather received medical treatment. And finally and farcically, the white owner was compensated for the loss of a slave three years after slavery. 29 Archivo Histórico Provincial de Matanzas (AHPM) Gobierno Provincial de Matanzas. Colonia, Negociado de Patrocinados, legajo 110, exp. 11391, 20.8.1882-3.2.1883, Causa seguida a un moreno patrocinado por herir gravemente a otro patrocinado, 20.08.18828.2.1883.

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The last case fits even less into what might be expected of a clear-cut class and race boundaries. In 1885 the Spanish Congressman Balselga demanded government intervention in the case of the death of a patrocinada negra named Agueda on the flogging block on the ingenio “España”. The Overseas Ministry tried to establish the truth in this case, which caused a scandal because the Gobernador Civil de La Habana was the apoderado general of the ingenio and killing a patrocinada was illegal. The first judge to preside over the case sentenced the white drover Don Francisco Zamora and the black driver Leonardo lucumí 30 both to four months and one day in prison as well as having to pay an indemnity. The prosecutor appealed against the sentence. In 1886 the higher court condemned Francisco Zamora to twelve years and one day in prison and Leonardo lucumí to six years and one day, both to pay indemnities. The owner of the patrocinada was not accused. The harsh final judgement is probably the consequence of the publicity of the case. The inquiry established that Leonardo lucumí had given three lashes to Agueda (whose age is not given, but as she is called negrita she was presumably a child or a young girl) on the order of Francisco Zamora, who promised Leonardo freedom and money if he would do this. Zamora was responsible for the abandonment of the hurt girl in the flogging block. According to the evidence of a doctor, it was not the lashes themselves but an epileptic attack, the result of the punishment of the feeble and rachitic girl that led to her death.31 We don’t know what the motive for the crime was, as much of the court file is missing. What we do learn, however, is that patrocinados were not better protected against a violent death at the hands of their owners or drivers than were slaves. If slavery had not existed the girl named Agueda would not have died in the block, but her male murderers were not slave owners and only one of them was white. There is no clear dichotomy: white=offender, black=victim of violence. A white and a black man as accomplices maltreated an ill young girl and led her die in loneliness. The path to find out what pos-

30

The ethnic adscription was often used instead of a surname. ARNAC, MdE, 3587, Dll, Expediente promovido por Real Orden por haber sido puesta en el cepo y fallecido en él la negra Agueda, patrocinada del Ingenio de España, 1885. Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Ultramar, legajo 4831, caja 3, exp. 48: Denunciando el hecho de haber muerto en cepo una joven patrocinada del ingenio “España”. The information of both files is incomplete and contradictory. In doubt, I followed the AHN file. 31

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sibly happened here would presumably lead to a constellation of personal vengeance within hierarchical gender relations. In the last two examples we see that violent conflicts did not only develop between white planters and black slaves/fieldworkers, but also within the Afro-Caribbean communities. SUMMARY White planters and colonial authorities spoke of the low class or caste of slaves or “nègres”, their prejudices referring to presumed common biological and cultural traits of people of African origin. Nobody used the term “race” at that time, but one always mentioned skin colour. After emancipation former slaves did not get their own land, nor were they treated as social equals by whites, both in Cuba and in Martinique. Labour coercion and political repression against former slaves was more forceful in Martinique than in Cuba. In Cuba the Spanish authorities used harsh means against both white and black Cubans who fought collectively against Spanish colonial rule. What the former slaves thought about their situation after abolition is difficult to find out. What can be determined about their actions one discovers in the sources of the religious education orders with respect to the freed slaves’ adaptive behaviour, especially their striving for social advancement through education; meanwhile judicial documents reveal resistant behaviour, such as refusing to do rural work and, in extreme situations, resorting to riots and arson. Women had to continue to do ‘male’ field labour in many cases, and these women, far from behaving in a ‘ladylike’ way, participated in violent protest actions. The social advancement of slaves as veterans of the War of Independence was only possible in Cuba, and it was reserved for men. The economic situation of female ex-slaves was dire and some of them turned to having a partnership with a white man as a solution. REFERENCES BALBOA NAVARRO, Imilcy. Los brazos necesarios. Inmigración colonización y trabajo libre en Cuba 1878-1898. Valencia: F. Tomás y Valiente UNED 2000. BARCÍA ZEQUEIRA, María C. La otra familia. Parientes, redes y descendientes de los esclavos en Cuba. La Habana: Casa de las Américas 2003.

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BARNET, Miguel. Biografía de un cimarrón. Novela. La Habana: Ed. Letras Cubanas 1993. BERGAD, Laird. “Spanish Migration to Cuba in the Nineteenth Century.” Anales del Caribe, 4/5 (1984/1985): 174-204. — Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century. The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990. — The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007. BERLIN, Ira, and Philipp MORGAN, eds. The Slaves Economy. Independent Production by Slaves in America. London: Frank Cass 1991. BLANCHARD, Peter, ed. Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence on Spanish South America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2008. BURNARD, Trevor. “The Planter Class.” The Routledge History of Slavery. Ed. Gad Heuman, and Trevor Burnard. London: Routlegde 2011. 187-203. BUSH, Barbara. Slave Women in the Caribbean Society, 1650-1838. Kingston: Heinemann 1990. COTTIAS, Myriam. “Mariage et citoyenneté”, Construire l´histoire antillaise. Ed. Lucien Abenon. Paris: Ed. du CTHS 2002. — “Droit, justice et dépendance dans les Antilles françaises (1848-1852).” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 59. 3 (2004): 547-567. — “Gender and Republican Citizenship in the French West Indies, 1848-1945.” Slavery & Abolition, 26.2 (2005): 233-245. — “Free but Minor. Slave Women, Citizenship, Respectability, and Social Antagonism in the French Antilles, 1830-1890”. Women and Slavery, II, The Modern Atlantic, Ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller. Athens: Ohio University Press 2008. 186-206. CRATON, Michael. “Proto-peasant revolts? The late slave rebellions in the British West Indies 1816-1832.” Past and Present, 85 (1979): 99-125. ÉLISABETH, Léo. “Rémunération du travail libre et question agraire à la Martinique et dans les colonies françaises d´Amérique de 1841 à 1851.” Esclavage, résistances et abolitions, Ed. Marcel Dorigny. Paris: CTHS 1999. 305-316. ELTIS, David, et al., eds. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. A Database on CD-Rom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999. FERRER, Ada. Insurgent Cuba, Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868-1898. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press 1999. — “Speaking of Haiti: Slavery, Revolution and Freedom in Cuban Slave Testimony,” The World of the Haitian Revolution. Ed. David Geggus, and Norman Fiering. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2009. 223-247. FRAZIER, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1939.

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GARCÍA, Gloria. Conspiraciones y revueltas, La actividad de los negros en Cuba (17901845). Santiago de Cuba: Ed. Oriente 2003. GAUTIER, Arlette. Les sœurs de solitude, la condition féminine dans l´esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIX siècle. Paris: Ed. Caribéennes 1985. GEGGUS, David. “Esclaves et gens de couleur libres de la Martinique pendant l´e´poque révolutionnaire et napoléonienne: trois instants de résistance.” Revue historique, CCXCV.1 (1996): 105-132. GENOVESE, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon Books 1965. — From Rebellion to Revolution. Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press 1979. GHACHEM, Malick. “Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions.” Historical Reflections, 29.1 (2003): 43-64. HALL, Douglas, and Sydney MINTZ. “The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System.” Papers in Caribbean Anthropology 57 (1960): 1-26. HATZKY, Christine. “Kontinuitäten und Transformationen afrikanischer Kulturen in der atlantischen Welt. Debatten um Sklaverei und Postemanzipationsgesellschaften.” Periplus (2010): 18-36. HELG, Aline. “Afro-Cuban Protest, The Partido Independiente de Color, 19081912.” Cuban Studies, 21 (1991): 101-121. HERSKOVITS, Melville. The Myth of Negro Past. Boston: Harper and Brothers 1941. HEUMAN, Gad. “Slave Rebellions.” The Routledge History of Slavery. Ed. Gad Heuman, and Trevor Burnard. London: Routlegde 2011. 220-233. HU-DEHART, Evelyn. “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor or Neo-Slavery.” Slavery & Abolition, 14. 1 (1993): 67-87. JENNINGS, Lawrence. French Anti-Slavery Movement for the abolition of slavery in France 1802-1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000. KRAKOVITCH, Odile. “Le rôle des femmes dans l´insurrection du Sud de la Martinique.” Nouvelle Questions Feministes, 910 (1985): 35-51. LARA, Oruno D. La liberté assassinée: Guadeloupe, Guayana, Martinique et la Réunion en 1848-1856. Paris: L’Harmattan 2005. LAVIÑA, Javier, and José RUIZ-PENADO. Resistencias esclavas en las Américas. Madrid: Doce Calles 2006. LOVEJOY, Paul. “The African Diaspora. Revisionist Representations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery.” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 2 (1997): 1-24. MIDLO HALL, Gwendolyn. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press 2005. MINTZ, Sydney. “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?” Review, 2.1 (1978): 8198.

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MINTZ, Sydney, and Richard PRICE, eds. An Anthropological Approach to the AfroAmerican Past: a Caribbean Perspective. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues 1976. MOITT, Bernard. Women and Slavery in the French Antilles 1635-1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2001. MORENO FRAGINALS, Manuel. The Sugar Mill. The socioeconomic complex of sugar in Cuba: 1760-1860. New York: Monthly Review Press 1976. MORRISON, Karen Y. “Creating an Alternative Kinship: Slavery, Freedom, and Nineteenth-Century Afro-Cuban Hijos Naturales.” Journal of Social History, 41.1 (2007): 55-80. NORTHRUP, David. “Indentured Indians in the French Antilles. Les immigrants indiens engagés aux Antilles Françaises.” Outre-mer: revue d´histoire, 87 (2000): 245-271 ORTIZ, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Santa Clara: Universidad Central de Las Villas 1963 (Orig. 1940). PAGO, Gilbert. 1848: chronique de l´abolition de l´esclavage. Fort-de-France: Desnel 2006. — Lumina Sophie dite “Surprise“, 1848-1879, Insurgée et bagnarde, Femme-flamme de l´insurrection du Sud 1870 en Martinique. Matoury: Ibis Rouge Éditions 2008. — L´insurrection de Martinique, 1870-1871, Paris: Syllepse 2011. PAQUETTE, Robert L. Sugar Is Made with Blood, The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press 1988. PALMIÉ, Stephan. Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1995. PATON, Diana, and Pamela SCULLY, eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham: Duke University Press 2005. PATTERSON, Orlando. Slavery as Social Death, A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1982. PERERA DÍAZ, Aisnara, and Maria A. MERIÑO FUENTES. Esclavitud, familia y parroquia en Cuba: Otra mirada desde la microhistoria. Santiago de Cuba: Ed. Oriente 2006. POTTHAST, Barbara. “Women are more Indian. Zum Verhältnis von Rasse/Ethnie, Klasse/Stand und Geschlecht in der spanischamerikanischen Kolonialzeit“. Interethnische Beziehungen in der Geschichte Lateinamerikas. Ed. Heinz-Joachim Domnick, Jürgen Müller, and Hans-Jürgen Prien. Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert 1999. 115-130. PRADOS-TERREIRA, Teresa. Mambisas. Rebel Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2005. RENARD, Rosamunde. “Labor Relations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 18481870.” Caribbean Freedom. Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present,

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A Student Reader. Ed. Hilary Beckles, and Verene Shepherd. London: James Currey 1993. 80-92. SALA MOLINS, Louis. Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 42007. SCHMIDT, Nelly. La France a-t-elle aboli l’esclavage? Guadeloupe - Martinique Guyane (1830-1935). Paris: Perrin 2009. SCHMIDT-NOWARA, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1999. SCHMIEDER, Ulrike. “Sklaverei und Sexualität im Kuba der Massensklaverei des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Unfreiheit und Sexualität von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Josef Fischer, and Melanie Ulz. Hildesheim: Olms 2010. 162-187. — “Slavery, Abolition and Post-Emancipation in the French and Spanish Caribbean, especially Martinique and Cuba, in the Network of Global Relations.” Ed. Ulrike Schmieder, Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, and Michael Zeuske. The End of Slavery in Africa and the Americas, A Comparative Approach. Berlin: LIT Verlag 2011. 117-140. SHEPHERD, Verene, Bridget BRERETON, and Barbara BAILEY, eds. Engendering History. Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. London: James Currey, et.al. 1995. SCOTT, Rebecca. Slave Emancipation in Cuba. The Transition to Free Labor 18601899. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985. — “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation.” American Historical Review, 99.1 (1994): 70-102. THOMPSON, Alvin O. Flight to Freedom, African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press 2006. THORNTON, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 14001800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992. TOMICH, Dale. Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830-1848. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990. — “Contested Terrains: Houses, Provision Grounds and the Reconstitution of Labor in Post-Emancipation Martinique.” From Chattel Slaves to Wages Slaves. The Dynamics of Labor Bargaining in the Americas. Ed. Mary Turner. Kingston: Ian Randle 1995. 241-257. TOMICH, Dale, and Michael ZEUSKE. “Introduction.” REVIEW, XXXI.2 (2008): 91-100. ZEUSKE, Michael. “Ciudadanos ‘sin otro apellido’. Nombres esclavos, marcadores raciales e identidades en la colonia y en la República, Cuba 1879-1940.” Ciudadanos en la nación. Ed. Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, and Michael Zeuske. Santiago de Cuba: Oficina del Conservador de la Ciudad 2002. 59-108. — Schwarze Karibik. Sklaven, Sklavereikultur und Emanzipation. Zürich: Rotpunktverlag 2004.

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— “Two stories of Gender and Slave Emancipation in Cienfuegos and Santa Clara, Central Cuba: A Microhistorical Approach to the Atlantic World.” Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Ed. Diana Paton, and Pamela Scully. Durham: Duke University Press 2005. 181-198. — “Sklaverei, Postemanzipation und Gender. Ein Überblick.” Postemanzipation und Gender, Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, 17.1 (2007): 18-37. ZEUSKE, Michael, and Max ZEUSKE. Kuba 1492-1902, Kolonialgeschichte, Unabhängigkeitskriege und die erste Okkupation durch die USA. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 1998.

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CIPRIANO REYES AND THE PARADOX OF A NON-DIASPORIC “NEGRO” IDENTITY IN ARGENTINA Ezequiel Adamovsky

ABSTRACT The historiography of the 20th century lower classes in Argentina has neglected the impact of differences of colour among Argentineans. The aim of this article is to argue that hints of a non-diasporic “negro” identity can be traced in Argentina’s 20th century. Reactions to the discrimination on “racial” grounds in the job market and in the political arena can indeed be found. However, they rarely appeared explicitly in the public sphere, but rather indirectly, through the use of certain keys and symbols that allude to the negro mark. The presence of this non-confrontational strategy will be explored by studying one of the rare cases in which it was explicitly formulated. In 1945 and 1946 Cipriano Reyes–a rank-and-file union organiser–played a key role in the birth of Peronism. His political imagination at that time included a re-definition of the national “melting pot” and a discussion of the frontiers of inclusion/exclusion of the Argentine nation.

Argentinean historiography has neglected the impact of “race” and/or differences of colour–i.e., perceptions of skin tones as indication of social standing–among Argentineans. The most important contribution on the making of the working class in Buenos Aires between 1850 and 1880, for example, argues that the relevant dimensions to understand class dynamics at that time were national belonging, gender, age, qualification, and social capital. Race or skin colour was not mentioned at all as a significant aspect when it comes to analysing identities or differentials in the job market (Sabato and Romero, 1992, 245). The same can be said about studies of the 20th century: the only “ethnic issue” acknowledged as such is that of the differences between Argentineans and immigrants, and between immigrants of different countries. Low-intensity conflicts between internal migrants and European immigrants have sometimes been noted, but colour was not considered as part of the explanation (e.g. Lobato, 2004, 32). It was only in the past few years that some historians have pointed to this curious omission and started

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to raise the question if there is an unattended “racial” or “ethnic” dimension to Argentinean history (Chamosa, 2008 and 2010; Milanesio, 2010; Adamovsky, 2007 and 2008-2009). This question, however, remains largely unexplored.1 The origin of this curious omission must be found in a “blind spot” that affects Argentinean culture as a whole. The elites that built Argentina claimed that the nation was embodied in a white-European people. At the end of the 19th century, inhabitants of African or Amerindian descent were declared extinct or acknowledged only as tiny remnant of the past with no demographic significance, dissolved in the massive torrent of European immigrants. Thus, the master narrative of the nation revolved around the idea of a “melting pot”, out of which a new, perfectly white and European “Argentinean race” emerged (Quijada, et al., 2000). This narrative lies at the core of most of the historian’s assumption of a colourless (but implicitly white) people.

IDEALS AND REALITIES The distance between this idea of the nation and the reality of the Argentinean people could not be larger. With regards to the alleged “purely European” origins, recent genetic surveys have shown that over 56% of the current population of the country has Amerindian ancestry, while African is present in between 6 and 10% (Corach, et al., 2006). Demographic and genetic surveys also show that people of Amerindian or African descent tend to have worse jobs and to live in poorer areas (Avena, et al., 2001 and 2003; Martínez-Marignac, et al., 1999; Stubbs and Reyes, 2006). No comprehensive survey of skin colours has been carried out in Argentina, but it is a reasonable assumption that people with Amerindian or African genetic markers will tend to have darker skins than those without them. Besides, there is little doubt that in Argentina, at least to some degree, there is a correspondence between higher social positions and lighter skins. The first (and for the moment the only) survey that considers skin colour as a variable in Argentina

1

The obvious exception here is the field of Afro-Argentinean studies, but most of their members are not historians but anthropologists.

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has shown that darker-skinned people tend to have worse educational achievements (Telles and Steele, 2012).2 The information about skin tones and genetic backgrounds, however, should not be collapsed, as, due to a long process of miscegenation, people with Amerindian or African ancestry may have diverse complexions, including “white”. Likewise, people of other ethnic backgrounds–including exclusively European–may also have skins perceived as “dark”. In Argentinean culture, however, being dark-skinned (colloquially referred to in Argentina as being “negro”, which does not mean having a black-African appearance–for the latter there is a different expression, “negro mota”) is interpreted by default as sign of a non-European background. “White” functions as an attribute of European-ness, while any other colour–especially if combined with a phenotype that appears as non-European–is considered an indication of miscegenation and therefore, by default, of a lower social standing. In reading through this article, we shall bear in mind that there is a distinction between, on one hand, being part (or descendent) of a particular human group recognised as such (i.e., an ethnos) and, on the other, having a phenotype and/or a skin tone perceived as non-white. The latter may or may not come together with the former. And yet, concrete cultural contexts and social interactions often make them interchangeable features.

A PARADOX IN LOWER CLASS IDENTITIES In spite of the discursive invisibilisation of the non-European components of the Argentinean population, racist aggressions against the lower classes were indeed present throughout history, particularly in moments in which they acquired political weight. Both Yrigoyen’s and Perón’s followers were discredited for being “negros”. Thus, their capacity to exercise citizenship was questioned, as the racial allusion evoked all the shortcomings traditionally associated with irrationality and barbarity. Moreover, as I have shown elsewhere, the middle class in Argentina built its own identity by using a peculiar narrative of history, in which it was heir of the progressive influence supposedly brought to the country by the European immigration. By

2

This survey, however, has serious methodological flaws.

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the same token, the middle class distinguished itself from the plebeian sectors of society, the “negros”, constructed as heirs of the half-breed criollos of the pre-immigration past, and therefore actual representatives of barbarity and backwardness, an obstacle to national prosperity and order (Adamovsky, 2009). We know next to nothing about the effects that these discourses of class and racial superiority may have had in lower class identities during the 20th century. As soon as this question is raised, we are confronted with a paradox. Despite skin-colour differentials in the job market and despite the pervasive presence of racist aggressions in the public and private spheres, during most of the 20th century there seems to have been no reactions to this specific problem among the lower classes. In other words, no discourses or identities emerged which would be aimed at confronting the myth of the white-European Argentina or at fighting racist insults (or at least not openly). To be sure, there were isolated efforts of some intellectuals to embrace the mestizo legacy. But among the lower classes, there is no apparent sign that being nonwhite could have been turned into an emblem of identity and pride against stigma and discrimination. For most of the 20th century, there seems to be no signs of any “negro” identification at all. By “negro identification” I mean any references to the darker skin tone as a feature that defines, at least partially, one’s self. Things changed in this respect after the 1980s and more obviously in the 1990s. As the economic and political crisis of the country spiralled, the capacity of the state (and therefore of the nation) to integrate the lower classes weakened. As a consequence, to put it in Rita Segato’s words, the effectiveness of the “cultural patrolling” that enforces the myth of the white-European country diminished, which in turn made room for a new visibility of non-white presences (Segato, 2007, 30). To be sure, the derogatory senses associated with non-white colours are still strong. But for the first time genuinely lower-class cultural and political expressions questioned that myth, and started to refer openly to darker skins with a sense of pride and in opposition to racism and also, albeit vaguely, to the higher classes. This became particularly visible in popular music, in cumbia artists such as Pablo Lescano, or in cuarteto stars like Carlos “la Mona” Jiménez, who denounced racial discrimination in their lyrics and adopted a “negro” identity with defiant pride. Politically, this current found expression later. The most visible example is kirchnerismo, which after 2008 started to use the white-black opposition as a

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way of identifying themselves with the plebeian sectors of society against the “oligarchy” (cf. Adamovsky, forthcoming). The emergence of a “negro” mark in lower class identities in the past two decades inevitably raises the question of how it relates to earlier evidence. We know that at the end of the 19th century there was still a strong black identity among Afro-Argentines. That identity was indeed audible in the public sphere, as the Afro-Argentines had several publications of their own to defend the rights of the people of colour. And it also contained a loose diasporic sense, that is, a notion that they were a local community connected with an African legacy and with similar communities elsewhere. But due to the whitening pressure of dominant discourses, before the end of the century Afro-Argentines became invisible (Geler, 2010). A hundred years later, a “negro” identity emerged (but this time, as I shall argue, without any diasporic sense, i.e., with no relation to things African, neither to African “negros” nor to an African origin, even a distant one). What happened between those two moments? Is the current negritud a totally new phenomenon, or is it related to its 19 th-century precedent? Did a black identity disappear in the 20th century, or rather survived–perhaps transformed into something new–as a “hidden transcript” that historians failed to see?

COLOUR AS INDICATOR OF CLASS However indirect, there are connections between the senses of the “negro” prevailing in the 19th century and now, even if these do not include references to an African past. To understand the passage from one moment to another and the loss of the diasporic sense, we need to consider that references to colour progressively became a sign of class position, irrespective of the phenotype of the persons referred to. There is evidence, at least since the late 19th century, that categories traditionally referring to “race” or “caste” were used generically to refer to lower occupational categories, regardless of the skin colour that these workers may have. For example, in 1898 José Eizaguirre, an intellectual of Cordoba’s elite, argued: It does not matter whether they are white, blond and correct in their facial features [perfil] as a manifestation of race, we call them “mulatto” because the

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father or mother, grandmother or uncle were service people in another time [...] (quoted in Carrizo, 2011, 30; cf. also Geler, 2010, 384).3

The use of the labels negro, cabecita negra, groncho, etc. during the 20th century followed a similar line. They pointed to the lower classes and to plebeian behaviour generically, conveying a “racial” mark that, however, did not necessarily need to be present or visible in the actual people thus named. According to many Argentines, one can be blond and be, however, “negro de alma” (black at soul). Although prejudice against the negros has an obviously racist component, it is a racism that, as Natalia Milanesio has noted, is subordinate to a function that is primarily one of class (Milanesio, 2010, 53-84; cf. also Frigerio, 2006). The recently emerging “negro” identity has a similar pattern. Unlike in other countries, like Brazil or the U.S., it does not appear primarily as the attribute of a particular ethnic group, recognisable by its phenotype, but rather as a peculiar way of referring to the class position of the poor and to the culturally plebeian. In Argentina someone perfectly white may consider him or herself a negro. This “black” identity is not related–or at least not explicitly–to any diasporic sense of an African origin (with the exception, of course, of the small groups that claim they are Afro-Argentines, which will not be dealt with in this article). Nor does it refer to a specific Amerindian ethnos, even if it may contain a vague sense of mestizaje (with the exception, of course, of those who recognise themselves as aboriginal nations, who will not be dealt with in this article either). Instead, being negro appears as an “racial” marker in what is fundamentally a class identity, rather than an ethnic identity strictly speaking. In other words, the current negro identification does not draw a line between two communities conceived as different. Instead, it simply uses a “racial” allusion to define itself as a class in opposition to another. This use, however, is not merely metaphorical, as it also reflects the interdependence of the categories of class and “race” in Argentina–in other words, the fact that class differences have been historically produced (and still reproduce themselves) not only by means of strictly economic processes, but also by using ethnic and phenotype differences.

3

This and the following quotes have been translated by the author.

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A HYPOTHESIS ON LOWER CLASSES AND BLACKNESS The emergence of expressions of “black” pride without diasporic sense is related to other phenomena of “re-ethnification” or “ethnogenesis” that became visible in the past two decades among various ethnic minorities (cf. Gordillo and Hirsch, 2010). However, we should keep in mind that the black pride we are dealing with is not the expression of any previously existing ethnos, nor is it used to carve out an ethnic group in the present. I shall argue that this black pride is the current manifestation of a previously existing strategy to challenge the myth of the white nation (and therefore, the right of the upper classes to embody the nation), whose traces can be found throughout the 20th century in an implicit or oblique manner. By means of this peculiar strategy–both in its more explicit present form and in the “hidden” precedents–the lower classes managed to confront the compulsory whitening of the body of the nation that dominant discourses demanded. However, they confronted it not by following the binary pair that those discourses presented–white vs. black–, but rather by adopting what Homi Bhabha calls a “strategy of hybridisation” of the kind that are often used by minorities that were excluded as a result of a process of cultural homogenisation operated by the state. Such strategy “opens up a space of negotiation” that is “neither assimilation nor collaboration”. It refuses “the binary representation of social antagonism”; instead, “they deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy” (Bhabha, 1996, 53-60). As we shall see in the following sections, allusions to the “negro” can be found in all of Argentina’s contemporary history (bear in mind that I am referring here to the condition of those who have darker skins, and not necessarily to people of known African ancestry or of any other concrete ethnic group). But they rarely manifested themselves in a direct manner, as they did from the 1980s onwards. Indeed, by means of certain practices and through forms of cultural consumption, the lower classes managed to make the nonwhite visible, in a way that undermined the implicit homogenisation produced by the discourse of a white-European nation. In this fashion, the lower classes were able to open up a “space of negotiation” that pointed toward a vision of national community that exceeded the black-white opposition. They presented their own, different idea of the melting pot, a melting pot in which non-white skins were displayed and recognised as part of the nation.

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This vision did not antagonise against the white. On the contrary, it was included on equal grounds together with the non-white. Thus, they subtly subverted the myth of the white nation (and therefore, the claim of the higher classes to embody it), without having to attack it directly.

THE HISTORICAL TRAILS OF A STRATEGY In the 20th century, this peculiar identity strategy can be perceived in at least four areas of popular culture and politics. All four areas display forms of reappropriation of discourses that originated in the world of elites and/or the state: the lower classes “translated” them their own way, thus enabling ambivalent and open-ended negotiations of meaning. The first, chronologically speaking, was the criollista discourse. The criollismo that the state and several intellectuals sponsored at the beginning of the 20th century was aimed at strengthening national pride against the wave of Anarchist and Marxist internationalism that was gaining influence among the working classes. And it was of the hispanista type: non-Spanish ethnic or cultural contributions were not celebrated as part of the glorious criollo roots. A few authors did praise the aboriginal legacy, but only as a stereotyped presence confined to a distant past, brought to the present only as folklore. Thus, in this variant of criollismo the (white) colour of the authentic Argentinean people was not at stake. Yet, the plebeian uses of criollismo profited from the interstices of this discourse and from the ambivalences in the definition of the criollo. In Argentina, as elsewhere, the term “criollo” refers to a person born in the country, as opposed to someone born overseas. This says nothing of ethnic backgrounds: they could be both of white-European origins. By extension, the term also refers to rural/traditional culture–which at the turn of the century was, by default, that of the gauchos from the pampas region–, as opposed to urban or cosmopolitan/modern culture. However, “criollo” is also used in Argentina with a particular ethnic sense, as a way to refer to inhabitants already settled there before the arrival of the great immigration of the late 19th century, and therefore marked by some degree of miscegenation. In this use, the criollo is considered different from the European not just in terms of culture or nationality, but also of ethnic descent (cf. Reina, 1973, n. 4, 172-73, 343). Thus, the criollista discourse offered the opportunity to display a demographic reality that was not always and only white-European, and plebeian

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culture took advantage of this chance from a very early stage. To give but few examples, the Afro-Argentines played a prominent role in the dissemination of the gauchesco dramas in the so-called Criollo Circuses, while some of the most renowned payadores, as Gabino Ezeiza, were black and composed songs in criollo style, making the presence of their “race” visible and reclaiming recognition as part of the Argentine people (cf. Lewis, 1996, 75-77 and 11920). Later on, as Oscar Chamosa pointed out, the promotion of criollo folklore by the state–particularly in festivals and celebrations during Perón’s first two terms–offered a particularly good stage where the non-white had the chance to exhibit themselves, thus denying the myth of the European nation (without the need to openly confront with it) (Chamosa, 2010). Secondly, throughout the 20th century carnival offered the chance to show or represent presences that passed unnoticed in the rest of the year. The carnival of Buenos Aires and other cities–with its parades of masks and costumes of foreigners of all kinds, cocoliches, Moreiras, blacks or Indians–was a formidable arena to process social tensions, not only stemming from class differences, but also from the clash between an alleged white identity and the de facto ethnic and phenotypic heterogeneity of the nation. For example, the phenomenon of the so-called lubolo ensembles (youngsters of the elite in blackface) in the last third of the 19th century, was aimed at mocking and stereotyping Afro-Argentines, conveying the idea that they belonged to a distant, backward past and therefore had no present relevance. But the very fact that the carnival could be used as an arena to represent ethnic diversity also provided an opportunity for plebeian groups (of Afro-Argentines and/or of other groups in blackface), to display or re-present the existence of nonwhites as part of the heterogeneous people of the nation. Carnival, in relation to colour and ethnicity, was an area of intense disputes during the whole of the 20th century (and it still is).4 A third area in which a similar strategy of representing the non-white became noticeable was mass culture, popular music from the 1930s onwards in particular. Radio stations and record companies interested in expanding their audiences made room for artists and rhythms that, in different ways, reflected the presence of the complexions and the ethnic groups that the myth of the white nation had made invisible. Evocations of the Afro-Argentines

4

On the conspicuous presence of Afro-Argentines in carnival cf. Martín, 2008.

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appeared frequently in tango lyrics and in its instrumentation modes; in the 1940s this became particularly fashionable, sometimes in combination with the candombes popularised, among others, by Alberto Castillo, whose shows also included tamboriles and black dancers (cf. Cirio, 2006).5 The remarkable success of the black Argentine Jazz star Oscar Alemán–whose album Negra de cabello duro was a blockbuster in 1943–may be interpreted as part of the same trend. After the 1930s, the chamamé–a lower-class rhythm coming from the Northeast of the country–also became popular in radio stations and sold many albums. Antonio Tormo’s version of “El Rancho’e la Cambicha”–which included words in Guaraní–broke all sales records in 1950 (cf. Vila, 2000). More or less at the same time, many of the folklore songs by Atahualpa Yupanqui, which became a real boom in the 1940s, were referring to the current condition of the “old races” [razas viejas] (those of the north-west in particular). Indeed, the very stage name that the singer chose for himself–he was a mestizo but his real name was Héctor Chavero–was an assertion of their presence. Later folklore was abundant in lyrics and rhythms identified with the rural workers, with blacks, indigenous groups, mestizos. The songbooks of two of the most celebrated artists of the 1960s and 1970s–Mercedes Sosa and Daniel Toro–, are particularly rich in such allusions. Thus, in the first decades of the 20th century diverse forms of popular culture contributed to make visible aspects of the country–particularly the outlook of its lower classes–denied by official discourses of the nation, thus undermining them, albeit indirectly. Politics was the domain in which the myth of the white nation would finally receive more serious challenges. Although there were some precedents, the occasion for these challenges to break through irreversibly was provided by the irruption of the Peronist movement. And here the distance between the state’s discourse and the ways in which the subaltern classes made it their own becomes crucial. Perón’s government was very active in the implementation of criollista cultural policies and took some of the first serious measures to ameliorate the situation of the indigenous people. However, the idea of the People endorsed by the Peronist state was as homogenizing as in the early 20th century. The People was and should remain united. No internal differences were acknowledged, other

5

Candombe is the best-known rhythm of African origins of the River Plate area; tamboril is a type of drum typically used for playing candombe.

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than the division between people and “oligarchy”, which would be overcome soon and replaced by a perfect social harmony. The hispanista variant of criollismo favoured by the government did not do much to challenge the idea that the typical Argentinean was a white person; confronting the myth of the white nation was not part of the agenda. However, in these years subaltern groups explored ways to make visible the non-white as portion of the Argentine people. To be sure, those explorations were part of the Peronist movement; the official Peronist discourse sometimes tolerated or ignored them, but at times also flirted with them or, on the contrary, repressed them. One obvious example would be the famous “Malón de la Paz” that the kolla people organised in 1946–the first large-scale political action of indigenous people in Argentina since the end of national organisation in 1880–firstly encouraged by the government, but forcibly expelled from Buenos Aires shortly after they had arrived (cf. Lenton, 2010).

CIPRIANO REYES AND THE NUANCES OF THE MELTING POT But more interesting for our purposes is the case of the Labour movement envisioned by Cipriano Reyes in 1946, as it included allusions to an ethnic mark–skin colour–, but without invoking any “race” or ethnos in particular. Cipriano Reyes was a young rank-and-file unionist of the Berisso meat packers union, and was a key organiser of the mythical mobilisation of the 17th of October (the birth of Peronism) and of the Labour Party that won Perón the presidency in 1946 (cf. Senén González, 2001). Born in the interior of the Province of Buenos Aires, Cipriano was well aware of the criollista genre, as he spent his childhood in an itinerant circus that staged gaucho dramas. In his youth, he even wrote gauchesco poems himself. Cipriano was a mestizo (his mother was indigenous). Among his several brothers, some were blonde like their father, one of them, Doralio, was “of a very dark complexion” like their mother, while Cipriano was slightly darkskinned.6 His friends of Berisso affectionately called him “el Negro” (a common nickname among the lower classes).7 6

Interview with Argelia Reyes and Sandra Prieto (daughter and grand-daughter of Cipriano Reyes), 05.08.2011. 7 Luis Jorge, for example, called him that; Interview with Luis Jorge, 16.02.2011.

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FIGURE 1: Cipriano Reyes, courtesy of Marcelo Galvez.

The fact that such nickname could be used affectionately does not mean that others did not use it as an insult. In his writings, Cipriano recalled at least two occasions in which he had to face the stigma of his colour. The first had none other than Perón as protagonist. On January 28th of 1946, they engaged in a tough discussion because of the determination of Perón to nominate the rest of the candidates for the coming election himself, without taking into account the will of the Labour Party. As the argument heated, Perón walked away from Cipriano, slamming a door in his face. Enraged, he recalls having said loudly: [W]e will not allow him to treat us as if he was the owner of the Republic... He thinks that we are just a bunch of poor blacks from the packinghouse [unos pobres negros de los frigoríficos] or that he can treat us as horses... It was us who took him out of Martín García on the 17th of October! (Reyes, 1987, 69).

According to Cipriano, shortly after this episode Perón himself let him hear the following remark, referring to the candidacy for governor of Domin-

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go Mercante: “Reyes would have had instead one of those blacks from the packinghouse, one of those who can only sign with a finger, instead of the gringo [i.e., Mercante]” (Reyes, 1987, 77, 82). The second occasion took place later on that year, during the ceremony in which Mercante took office in La Plata. Cipriano was already a persona non grata for the new government. While attending the event, four members of the personal guard of Perón intimidated him verbally and with guns. Among other things, as Cipriano recalled, one of the guards said, “Look, if all this was under my authority, I would fix it my way, even if I had to leave forty negros thrown on the street” (referring to the meat packing workers that supported Reyes and to Reyes as their leader) (Reyes, 1987, 122). In addition, at least in one occasion, in 1947, the press noted his skin colour in a derogatory way.8 Apart from these episodes, it is worth noting that Cipriano frequently used the expression “negrero” to denounce the exploitative disposition of employers in general, and of packinghouses in particular (Reyes, 1973, 41, 142, 161, 196, 210; 1971, 16, 17, 19). The working conditions before 1944 were so bad, that he described them with the following comparison: “it seemed like an industry of the heart of Africa” (Reyes, 1971, 62). To be sure, the inadequacy of his skin colour according to the prevalent notions of respectability made Cipriano particularly perceptive of ethnic or “racial” differences. He rarely fails to mention them while he describes people in his autobiography. His mother was “dark-skinned” (morena) while “darky” or “dark haired” (the ambiguous morocho) was the term he used for himself. Of his travels as a penniless wanderer, he fondly remembers the “negro Acevedo”, a “rather mota black”9 who gave him as a present a book by the Peruvian writer Chocano, described as “the best Latin American rebel poet [...], the great defender of the freedom of their land and of the exploited indigenous race”. Also worth a mention is the “gringo” Leverato Biancone, a “blond” farmer who hired him as a day labourer, and the “gringo” and “criol-

8

In an article by La Voz del Pueblo of Tres Arroyos (17.01.1947), kept as a clipping among his personal papers, Cipriano was referred to as one of “los negros” in explicit opposition to “los blancos”. 9 Mota is the name given to curly hair typical of black Africans. In Argentina, adding “mota” to the word “negro” is one of the most common ways to denotate that one is referring to an Afro-looking person, as opposed to a simple negro, someone of dark skin but without an obvious African phenotype.

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lo” origins of other fellow labourers there. Juan, the worker who introduced him to anarchist unionism in Buenos Aires, was a “blond” and “blue-eyed” Catalan. In Zárate, Mariano Domínguez, who urged him to get involved in the struggles of meat workers, was “darky”/“dark-skinned”. The unionist Luis Villaflor is remembered as “the great negro militant activist” (Reyes, 1973, 16, 19, 62-63, 72, 39, 48, 52, 83, 89, 232). Unlike the official discourses of the nation, Cipriano was not colour-blind. Berisso, where he eventually settled in the early forties, was a showcase of the human diversity of the Argentinean lower classes. In the 1930s, almost 50% of the adult population was of foreign origin. Italians and Spaniards were the majority, but there were also large contingents from several countries of Eastern Europe, from Greece and from Syria-Lebanon. There were Christians of various creeds, Muslims and Jews. At the end of that decade a massive wave of internal migrants arrived, particularly from Santiago del Estero, Corrientes and other provinces, many of them of dark skins and mestizo phenotype. The presence of these “little black heads” (cabecitas negras), as they were called, sparked low-intensity tensions in the community. In interviews carried out decades later, inhabitants of Berisso remembered diverging feelings (some people, of being invaded; others, of being discriminated against or looked down upon) (cf. Lobato, 2004, 57, 62). To this heterogeneous ethnic landscape, we should add the presence of a group of AfroArgentines of Cape Verdean descent, mostly based in the neighbouring Ensenada, but who used to work in Berisso’s packinghouses. Each group maintained then a vigorous community life, which revolved around ethnicbased associations. The majority of the associations that represented overseas immigrants were established around the 1910s; Cape Verdeans founded theirs in 1927; the last to arrive, the santiagueños and correntinos established their own associations in 1944. This ethnic diversity could not pass unnoticed before the eyes of Cipriano, as he was committed to uniting the people despite (but without ignoring) their differences: Thus was Berisso. […] It was heterogeneous, universal in its human conception, because its family and social structures were made of men and women of different races and countries of the world, and different national regions: Poles, Ukrainians, Arabs, Italians, Jews, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks and fellow Argentines from the north, all coming here attracted by the huge structures of the packinghouses. On this muddy land, in front of the chimneys of the two

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packinghouses, with self-sacrifice, with their community groups, they erected a town full of life and hope. They formed their homes, mingling in our families, assimilating their ways and customs, regardless of skin colour, the creed of their religion, the difficulty of the language, the blood of the race or the ideological barriers (Reyes, 1973, 164-65).

Thus, in Cipriano’s way of perceiving the demographic reality around him, the melting pot that long ago had supposedly blended all groups into a colourless (i.e., white) Argentine race, gave way to a rainbow in which colour differences acquired particular visibility. But how to unify diverse popular agents in a cultural context that stigmatised those of darker skins? The easiest choice was to keep on invisibilising them. However, Cipriano Reyes faced this challenge in 1946 by postulating a remarkable vision of the nation in the making, which blended motifs of popular nationalism and criollismo, while distinguishing itself from the discourse of the Peronist government. In a text published in 1946, Cipriano explained Labour’s mission in a peculiar way. For him, the Labour movement was “profoundly national”. It was nurtured by the legacy the “independent intransigence of the gaucho wars”. However, it exceeded the nation in the narrow definition of it: Argentina’s Labour “declares the unity of continental destiny and shapes its future in the perspective of the Americas, one working and exploited large family”. It is worth noting how he expands and redefines the boundaries of the nation, and, at the same time, the identity of the working masses that embody it. The nation is not linked with Europe–as in the dominant discourses of the Argentinean nation–, but with the American continent; the people is Argentine, but at the same time is part of a greater American family. Significantly, his definition of Labour continues to explain that it comes from [...] the struggling voices of the exploited in the green deserts of San Luis, from San Juan’s forgotten and from the historical pain and thirst of the damned of Catamarca, La Rioja and Jujuy, joining, in an urgent choir that claims solutions, the voices of the slaves of Misiones, Chaco, Tucumán, Entre Ríos, pariahs in their own land (Reyes, 1946, 23-24).

The list is revealing both for what is included and excluded. The regions that he mentions seem to be chosen to represent the provinces most clearly associated with miscegenation. Neither Buenos Aires, nor the provinces of

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the “pampa gringa” are mentioned before or after this paragraph.10 Finally, Cipriano completes the definition of Labour with a noteworthy phrase: We make no differences when it comes to race or colour; we make no differences of religious feelings. We are breath of the People, and within the People there is room for all religious feelings and for all the nuances that the iris can perceive (Reyes, 1946, 27).

The concern for issues of race and religion had a purpose that we need to clarify to fully understand this statement. At that time, Peronism was being repeatedly accused of being and anti-Semitic Nazi-fascist movement.11 In response to this accusation, Cipriano–who believed in Jesus but had no attachment to the Church–, chose to deny the especial association between the nation and Catholicism (which by then the government still held). But more relevant for our purposes is the reference to colour differences, which was extremely rare in the discourse of official Peronism. Cipriano uttered the same phrase on the “nuances of the iris” in the speech he delivered in front of the Congress, in the celebration of the first anniversary of the 17th October, which the Labour Party organised separately from the official meeting.12 The leaflets inviting to the Congress gathering (fig. 2) also referred to racial differences. A People composed of all the diversity of nuances that the iris can capture: here is Cipriano’s vision. The People (and therefore the nation), is thus redefined in a way that does not confront openly against the binary pair of state discourses. Cipriano does not affirm blackness or non-whiteness to confront against the whiteness of the nation. Instead, he shifts the axis of the dispute and proposes a third space that (albeit implicitly) disputes the validity of the myth of the white nation. Cipriano’s melting pot does not erase the differences of skin colour: his nation (Argentine, American and cosmopolitan), was able to see them and include them all.

10

Surely an involuntary omission, as in a speech delivered at the same time the pampas region did get mentioned in a similar statement; cf. “Movimiento Político. Partido Laborista”, La Nación, 10.07.1946. 11 See the statement of the Labour Party on this regard: “Motivan protestas los actos de índole racista”, La Nación, 28.11.1945. 12 Clarín, 18.10.1946, p. 8.

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FIGURE 2: “Labour Party. The flag that gives shelter to all free men and fuels the hopes of the oppressed. Without racial distinctions, without making differences of class, without political burdens, we strive for the real and positive brotherhood of the Argentinean family, in which we all have the same rights and the same duties.” Leaflet for the Labour Party rally of 17 October 1946. Courtesy of Argelia Reyes.

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FIGURE 3: Cipriano and other members of the Berisso Labour Party, 1946. Courtesy of Luis Guruciaga.

Indeed, in Cipriano’s vocabulary in these years the melting pot is a rather frequent metaphor.13 But it is a melting pot–as it reads in this photo (fig. 3) in the poster placed in the wall of the Labour Party house of Berisso–that is new, that is still to be done, “the melting pot for a better Argentina”. The very need for such a new melting pot subtly undermines the validity of the official discourse of the nation, which claimed that the homogeneity of the “Argentinean race” had been achieved long ago. All the elements that we found in his political texts reappear more clearly in the poems that Cipriano wrote throughout his life. The question of fraternity beyond differences (including those of colour) is treated in some of them. “Brother of the World”, for example, reads as follows:

13

He uses it in, for example, in Reyes, 1946, 18 and in the speech he delivered to break up with Peronism: cf. “Se separa del Bloque el diputado Cipriano Reyes”, La Razón, 10.07.1946.

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I don’t care who you are,/ what’s your name, where you live/ or where you are coming from;/ white, black, free or forgotten/ of whatever race, ideas or creed,/ you are nothing but my brother [...] Come, brother of the world,/ of whatever race, ideas or creed,/ let us take our hands and walk together/ along the path that we dream of/ towards that new world! (Reyes, 1985, 101).

This cosmopolitan ideal, however, is anchored in a concrete region: Latin America. The poem “Fraternity”, in fact, ends by inviting the reader to make “of all the Continent one Fatherland”. Named “Indoamérica, Hispanoamérica, Latinoamérica”, the continent appears conspicuously as a stage of Cipriano’s dreams of a better future. This awaited time would arrive as a result of the struggle of the “people melted (acrisolada) in the blood of its race”, who are also defined simply as the “pariahs” and the “oppressed”. The event of the 17th October 1945 appears in two poems, described as the “birth” of “a new American consciousness” (Reyes, 1985, 109, 115, 87, 111-114). A rather curious allegorical representation that Cipriano imagined many years later can help illuminate the way in which the issue of colour appears in the aforementioned third space, thus questioning the exclusive whiteness of the nation. In 1980, the literary vocation of the old man of Berisso produced a long poem entitled My sermon on the plain. The poem is presented by a muse, invented by Cipriano himself, whom he calls Humanía (fig. 4). An allegory, Humanía represents humanism, “the inherent and essential values that make the biological integrity of the divine and human in Men”. She is the enemy of injustice, she “ rejects the gods of opulence and oppression” and fights against poverty. Cipriano describes his allegorical image in these terms: A slender body dressed up in a simple white fabric, with loose wavy hair; a clear and deep gaze that transmits strength and serenity of spirit; black white complexion [tez morena blanca, sic]; her neck is adorned with a collar of tiny shells finished in a small sandalwood crucifix on her chest. She wears Nazarene sandals. Pieces of broken chains (the symbol of freedom) hang from her corded belt, tightened on her waist. In her right hand, the arm extended forward, she has two rolls: one containing the Gospel of Christ, the other, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With her left arm she carries a naked baby, holding it tight against her breast (the image of Humankind) (Reyes, 1980, 21-24).

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FIGURE 4: Humanía, from My Sermon on the Plain cover (Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires).

A symbol of the desired future, Cipriano’s muse was not colourless: she was “black white”, a meaningless phrase, in which one term contradicts the other. The apparent oxymoron may perhaps illuminate the hopes that Cipriano had in 1945, when he imagined that he was helping to give birth to a new Argentina, a country in which dark skins were not invisible, but were integrated on equal grounds.

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THE BLACK AS METONYMY The strategy of hybridisation that we have just analysed is similar to those described by Homi Bhabha, discussed earlier in this article. Indeed, the political imagination of Cipriano implicitly defied the normalising pressures of the dominant narratives of the nation; he redefined the terms of engagement so as to avoid confronting in the binary representation of antagonism that they presented (the white vs. the black), and deployed a new vision of the community and a new version of historical memory, thus making room for a multiplicity of colours. However, the similarity is not complete. For Cipriano did not just give narrative form to a minority position, to make room for it as a “part of the whole”. Instead, he proposed a new image of the national “whole” that did struggle–at least implicitly–for cultural sovereignty. In other words, it did not see itself as a minority voice, a “part of the whole”, but as the voice of the real working people, the only one authorised to speak for the nation. At the time, Cipriano’s strategy did not find fertile soil to develop as an explicit position, articulated in public debates. Both the liberal tradition and the Peronist state continued to issue homogenising visions of a people “without colour” (therefore white). For the time being, there was no cultural or political ground, among the lower classes, to launch an open debate against the official discourses of the nation. During the years of Peronism and for the following decades, the predominant strategy of the lower classes to undermine the myth of the white nation and to resist the effects of racism continued to be rather implicit and “silent”. Indeed, the non-diasporic black identity that eventually emerged was a mutation of this strategy, once the political and cultural context became more permeable. The function of these references to the black–whether implicit or explicit–, then, is not to claim membership in a particular ethnos (Amerindian, mestizo or Afro-Argentine), but to make visible metonymically the human diversity that composes the world of the lower classes. One of the most common rhetoric devices, metonymy operates, among other ways, by pointing to the part to refer to the whole. In this case, the black functions as an encompassing signifier for the totality of the people of the lower classes, irrespective of their colour. In racist discourses, this metonymy is used to transfer over the entire lower classes the stigma originally associated only to those of African origin. But taken up by the subaltern without its racist connotation, the part is there to refer to a very different whole, the whole of the common people with its

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diversity of colours recognised and accepted, rather than denied. One of its parts–the dark-skinned people–takes the place of the whole to make visible the fact that that whole is indeed neither white nor colourless, as the dominant discourses would have it. At the same time, the metonymy also points to the subaltern condition, associated with the sense of exclusion or asymmetry of power that the word “black” evokes (in Argentina, for example, as a victim of the negrero boss or simply of racist contempt). Somehow, this metonymic operation points to a unified whole, diverse but without ethnic conflicts, and made of equals. In other words: a whole that exists only as desire.

CONCLUSION It was only after the 1980s, as a result of the decline of the state’s capacity to include the majority of the people in a sense of shared citizenship, that “nonwhite” identities found the chance to become audible. But this does not mean that there were not earlier, subtler forms of assertion of the non-white as part of the lower classes. The problem is that they left few written or direct traces. The more explicit forms, as the one attempted by a rather exceptional character like Cipriano Reyes, were very rare. As an identity movement, we can only deduce it from certain social practices, from some cultural consumptions, and from some ways it re-presents itself in public that are visual or musical, rather than discursive. The black identity without diasporic sense that emerged after the 1980s, had a previous history indeed. But, to put it in James Scott’s words, it pre-existed as a “hidden transcript”. Or perhaps not even as such, but rather as an unconscious manifestation in the identity of the subaltern classes.14 The difficulty to perceive the ethnic dimension of class identities in 20th century Argentina has to do in part with this elusiveness (to which we must add the persistent blind spots of local historiography). But it also betrays the need of better theoretical tools, if we are to understand the complexity of the interdependencies of social categorisations in each local context. 14

The relationship between these earlier manifestations and the 19th-century diasporic identity that existed among afroargentines, mentioned earlier, remains unclear. Although the latter did contain elements of class-consciousness, it seems obvious that it was primarily an ethnic identity. However, it is not impossible that Afro-Argentines made their own contribution to the emergence of the former, after they became “invisible” as an ethnic group. This is only a conjecture that will need further research if it is to become a real hypothesis.

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REFERENCES ADAMOVSKY, Ezequiel. “Historia y lucha de clase: repensando el antagonismo social en la interpretación del pasado.” Nuevo Topo, 4 (2007): 7-33. — ed. “Encuesta: ¿Existe una dimensión étnica o racial desatendida en la investigación social en Argentina?” Nuevo Topo, 5 and 6 (2008 and 2009): 147-160 and 133-156. — Historia de la clase media argentina. Buenos Aires: Planeta 2009. — “El color de la nación argentina: Conflictos y negociaciones por la definición de un ethnos nacional, de la crisis al Bicentenario.” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas (forthcoming). AVENA, Sergio A., et al. “Análisis antropogenético de los aportes indígena y africano en muestras hospitalarias de la ciudad de Buenos Aires.” Revista Argentina de Antropología Biológica [hereafter RAAB], 3.1 (2001): 79-99. — “Aporte aborigen y africano de diferentes regiones de la Argentina en Buenos Aires.” RAAB, 5.1 (2003): 49. BHABHA, Homi. “Culture’s In Between”. Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall, and Paul du Gay. London: Sage 1996. 53-60. CARRIZO, Marcos. “Córdoba morena, 1830-1880.” Licenciatura Dissertation. Córdoba 2011. CHAMOSA, Oscar. “Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White Argentina in Tucuman’s Calchaqui Valley.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 88.1 (2008): 71-106. — “Criollo and Peronist: The Argentine Folklore Movement during the First Peronism, 1943-1955.” The New Cultural History of Peronism. Ed. M. Karush, and O. Chamosa. Durham: Duke University Press 2010. 113-142. CIRIO, Pablo. “La presencia del negro en grabaciones de tango y géneros afines.” Buenos Aires negra: identidad y cultura. Ed. Leticia Maronese. Buenos Aires: Comisión para la Preservación del Patrimonio Histórico Cultural de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2006. 25-59. CORACH, Daniel, et al. “Relevant Genetic Contribution of Amerindian to the Extant Population of Argentina.” International Congress Series, 1288 (2006). 397-99. FRIGERIO, Alejandro. “Negros y Blancos en Buenos Aires: Repensando nuestras categorías raciales,” Buenos Aires negra: identidad y cultura. Ed. Leticia Maronese. Buenos Aires: Comisión para la Preservación del Patrimonio Histórico Cultural de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2006. 77-98. GELER, Lea. Andares negros, caminos blancos: afroporteños, Estado y Nación Argentina a fines del siglo XIX. Rosario: Prohistoria 2010. GORDILLO, Gastón, and Silvia HIRSCH, eds. Movilizaciones indígenas e identidades en disputa en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: La Crujía 2010.

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KARUSH, Matthew, and Oscar CHAMOSA, eds. The New Cultural History of Peronism. Durham: Duke University Press 2010. LENTON, Diana. “The Malón de la Paz of 1946: Indigenous Descamisados at the Dawn of Peronism.” The New Cultural History of Peronism. Ed. M. Karush, and O. Chamosa. Durham: Duke University Press 2010. 85-111. LEWIS, Marvin A. Afro-Argentine Discourse: Another Dimension of the Black Diaspora. Columbia: University of Missouri Press 1996. LOBATO, Mirta. La vida en las fábricas, 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Prometeo 2004. MARTÍN, Alicia. “Folclore en el carnaval de Buenos Aires”, PhD Dissertation. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2008. MARTÍNEZ-MARIGNAC, Verónica, et al. “Estudio del ADN mitocondrial de una muestra de la Ciudad de La Plata.” RAAB, 2.1 (1999): 281-300. MILANESIO, Natalia. “Peronists and Cabecitas: Stereotypes and Anxieties at the Peak of Social Change.” The New Cultural History of Peronism. Ed. M. Karush, and O. Chamosa. Durham: Duke University Press 2010. 53-84. QUIJADA, Mónica, et al. Homogeneidad y nación. Con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX. Madrid: CSIC 2000. REINA, Ruben E. Paraná: Social Boundaries in an Argentine City. Austin: University of Texas Press 1973. REYES, Cipriano. Qué es el Laborismo. Buenos Aires: R.A. 1946. — Entrevista. Proyecto de Historia Oral del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1971. — Yo hice el 17 de Octubre. Buenos Aires: GS 1973. — Mi sermón de la llanura. La Plata: Ramos Americana 1980. — Cantos de amor, cantos de lucha. La Plata: Ramos Americana 1985. — La farsa del peronismo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana-Planeta 1987. SABATO, Hilda, and Luis Alberto ROMERO. Los trabajadores de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 1992. SEGATO, Rita. La nación y sus otros. Buenos Aires: Prometeo 2007. SENÉN GONZÁLEZ, Santiago. “Cipriano Reyes: 100 años de historia.” Criterio, 2265 (2001). Web. , 01.02.2013. STUBBS, Josefina, and Hiska N. REYES. Más allá de los promedios: Afrodescendientes en América Latina (Resultados de la prueba piloto de captación en la Argentina). San Martín: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero 2006. TELLES, Edward, and Liza STEELE. “Pigmentocracia en las Américas: ¿cómo se relaciona el logro educativo con el color de piel?” Perspectivas desde el Barómetro de las Américas, 73 (2012). VILA, Pablo. “El Tango y las identidades étnicas en Argentina.” El Tango nómade. Ed. Ramón Pelinski. Buenos Aires: Corregidor 2000. 71-97.

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DECENTRALISATION AND LOCAL POWER RELATIONS IN CHUQUISACA, BOLIVIA Dennis Avilés Irahola

ABSTRACT The research starts from the hypothesis that uniform political reforms have different results depending on the pre-existing local socio-economic and political power settings. The study looks at the way in which local actors reconfigured power relations at municipal level after the Law of Popular Participation (1994) was passed in Bolivia. The results show that inequalities and exclusions endure through old mechanisms of power retention in high socially differentiated municipalities, which are historically dominated by male, white-mestizo population. In lower differentiated societies with an indigenous majority, historical patterns of colonisation, land reform and political action contribute to improving access to the benefits of the decentralisation process for women and indigenous peoples.

INTRODUCTION Democratic decentralisation processes aim to provide citizens with equal rights to influence decisions that affect them and to give them a voice on the use of local public funding. However, many authors raise the question of whether decentralisation perpetuates existing power relations as well as social, economic, and regional inequities (Schönwälder, 1997, 753-770; Hadenius, 2003, 1-3; Arocena, 1995, 63; Balogun, 2000, 153-173; Crook and Sturla, 2001, 4; Blair, 2000, 21-39). For example, Johnson (2001, 525) highlights numerous studies pointing that decentralisation “may simply empower local elites and, worse, perpetuate existing poverty and inequality”. Whether the introduction of democratic principles–on its own–would overcome the historical and cultural factors that perpetuate political inequality is somewhat doubtful.” As summarised by Crook and Manor (1998, 302), “even the most appropriately designed institutions for decentralisation cannot work independently of or even against contradictory forces coming from the social and political structures within which they are embedded”. Decentralisation

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implies policy interventions at regional and local levels, where power dynamics are already in place. While pursuing their own goals local actors reinterpret or transform policies during the implementation process and, often, their interests clash with the interests of central authority (Long, 2001, 31). Based on the evidence presented by the authors mentioned above, this study started from the assumption that the application of the same decentralisation policies in different social contexts in Bolivia results in different allocations of power depending on the pre-existing local social structures. Embedded in these social structures, ethnicity, urban-rural residence, class and gender differences set the complex scenario of interests played in the reallocations of power. Eight rural municipalities in Bolivia comprise the case studies through which the study discusses the main central question: How do local actors from municipalities with different social constellations re-create dynamics of power relations in the framework of the decentralisation process? Along with this discussion, this article shows the relevance of the interplay of social categories in shaping new power dynamics. The study draws on two complementary perspectives in order to answer the question posed above. The first one, developed in detail from the actor oriented approach (see Long, 2001), maintains that social actors possess the knowledge and capability to assess problematic situations and organise ‘appropriate’ responses. As such, social actors are not just passive subjects of central normative and development interventions. A second claim implies that ‘history matters’ and that real constraints and possibilities are built up over time. Critical junctures or historical events understood as “transitions that establish certain directions of change and foreclose others in a way that shapes politics for years to come” (Collier and Collier, 2002, 27) play a role in defining these constraints and possibilities. The data collection for this study is comprised of participatory observation, interviews, questionnaires and documentation review in the research tradition of the actor oriented approach and the historical analysis.1 The framework of this study is the process of decentralisation in Bolivia, initiated since the passing of the Ley 1551 de Participación Popular (LPP, Law 1 More than hundred interviews were applied to national, regional and local authorities, NGO members, and local leaders from different ethnic, class and gender backgrounds. Two workshops took place in two of the eight studied municipalities, where individual and group questionnaires were completed.

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1551 of Popular Participation, 1994). The article analyses the local dynamics after the application of the LPP in municipalities where ethnic composition, rural-urban residence, gender and occupational and economic differentiation interplay to determine possibilities of or constrains from gaining political power. The configuration of power relations has been analysed as the set of social relations that determine both domination and subordination positions in three dimensions: political representation, influence over decisions that affect the entire municipal population, and control over the local government’s performance.

DECENTRALISATION AND POPULAR PARTICIPATION: THE BOLIVIAN CASE Decentralisation acquires different meanings in theory and practice and names similar processes with different characteristics worldwide. In this study, decentralisation refers to the devolution of political, administrative, and economic power from the central state to lower territorial units (i.e. the nine Bolivian departments and 327 municipalities). In Bolivia, international and national actors spawned the debate over the decentralisation process. Firstly, international organisations promoted drastic economic and political reforms since the mid 1980s as they did in most Latin American countries. These reforms required stepping aside from the traditional model of a centralist state, its administrative inefficiencies and concentration of power. Secondly, the national actors in regional peripheries along with specific interest groups–unions, women’s organisations, employees in regional offices, and others–demanded more autonomy and participation in the decision-making processes of local development. The civic committees, the regional groups comprised of influential local organisations, were the ones which exerted most pressure to the central government in order to increase the share of the regional natural resources exploitation. In 1994, and unlike other countries, Bolivia initiated a decentralisation process starting with the LPP. This was an ambitious initiative to include four key changes in the country’s political and administrative system. First, it brought the political party system closer to historically marginalised social groups by establishing local elections. It was not the first attempt to establish municipal elections, but before the LPP people living in communities did not benefit from any investment and felt unconcerned with what they con-

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sidered as “urban” issues and voting participation was very poor.2 Second, it explicitly reformulated the municipal governments’ responsibilities in order to cover not only urban but also rural areas. Third, it reformed public expenditure by distributing automatically 20% of the state central tax revenues on a per capita basis among the 314 municipalities (co-participation resources). Currently, there are 327 municipalities which benefit from state transfers and own revenues. Furthermore, along with these resources, international projects and external funds started flowing through municipal channels, giving solid economic support to the process. Fourth, it encouraged peoples’ participation in local development by involving them in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of municipal projects. The scale of consultation and information sharing taking place in rural areas was unprecedented and, since then, is a widespread practice. One consequence of this process was that political parties turned their attention to small and medium size municipalities and pursued the votes of the indigenous residents: the Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní and other ethnic groups. According to their own self-identification with an ethnic group, the indigenous comprise approximately 55% of the Bolivian population (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE 2002).3 Additionally, the Ley 1779 de Reforma al Régimen Electoral (Law 1779 of Reform to the Electoral Regime, 1997) assigned 30% quote to women’s candidacies, resulting in the promotion of indigenous women to political local seats. Although this process brought indigenous men and women into office in many municipal governments4, it also resulted in privileged groups consolidating their position in other 2

The Ley de Municipalidades (Law of Municipalities, 1985) already established that the local population should elect municipal councils under political party representation (Art 14, Law 696, 10.01.1985). Rural population, however, faced constraints such as the promotion of candidates only in the urban areas (Rojas, 1997, 228) and lack of identity cards (Nijenhuis, 2002, 48). 3 During the last Bolivian census (2001), approximately 55% of the population identified itself as indigenous, mostly from Quechua and Aymara origin. Other indigenous groups were also present, including the Guaraní. Approximately 30% of the population identified itself as mestizo (of mixed indigenous and European ancestry) and 15% as white. 4 The 1995 and 1999 elections brought between 20 and 25% of indigenous people into office in the municipal governments, where before was almost none. During the last municipal elections (2004), changes to the Bolivian Constitution allowed the inclusion of indigenous candidates without political party intermediation. The candidates won 5.8% of municipal seats.

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municipalities. These groups are comprised mainly by males of urban origin with mixed European and indigenous ancestry (white-mestizos). The decentralisation process deepened through several laws and norms. Among them, the following four contributed the most to strengthen the participation of the local population and advanced a decentralisation project to achieve the current regional autonomies. First, the Ley 1654 de Descentralización Administrativa (Law 1654 of Administrative Decentralisation, 1995), which assigned to municipal governments the role of counterparts in the coordination of departmental developmental plans, transfer of resources and other attributions of the departmental governments. Second, the reform of the article 224 of the Bolivian Constitution (2004), which eliminated the monopoly of political parties by allowing independent citizen groups to present their own candidates. Third, the Law 3090 (Law 3090 of Interpretation of the National Constitution’s Article 109) allowed the direct election of authorities at departmental level (Governors), for the first time in Bolivian history. Finally, the Ley 031 de Marco de Autonomías (Law 031 of Autonomies, 2010), guarantees four autonomous levels and assigns them new powers: the autonomous departmental and municipal governments, the regional autonomy and the peasant indigenous native autonomy. The study presented here focuses on the reconfiguration of local power relations within the framework of the LPP during the period 2001-2005. The scope of the study does not include the regulations passed after that. However, the results provide important insights on questions such as how local actors face real constraints and opportunities emerging at the intersections between different social categorisations in the framework of decentralisation policy interventions. The following section describes how municipalities have been selected and the criteria applied to classify them as high and low socially differentiated.

HIGH AND LOW SOCIALLY DIFFERENTIATED MUNICIPALITIES In the valleys of Chuquisaca, where low differentiated municipalities are located, Quechua peasant communities comprise the majority of the population. The national revolution of 1952 eliminated their obligations to the patrones and the following Ley 3464 de Reforma Agraria (Law 3464 of Agrarian Reform, 1953) granted them access to land and the right to

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organise themselves under peasant unions. The few residents with whitemestizo background who remained in the area live mostly in the core towns and are devoted to trading, agricultural activities and used to occupy the few available professional posts. Although some of them are devoted and related to agricultural activities, they are not considered as of the peasant class. Conversely, the lower lands of the Chaco areas where high differentiated municipalities are located were originally inhabited by Guaraní people who were subjugated late in the 19th century by white-mestizo settlers, the church, and ex-army officers. A later influx of highland immigrants in these richer and less densely populated municipalities added to the high socio-cultural diversity during the 1950s and 1970s. The 1952 national revolution had poor success in these remote areas with dispersed population and many white-mestizo retained their privileges as land owners as well as authorities in the core towns. The immigrants from Aymara background comprise the main group of merchants in towns. Their occupation and new residence change their categorisation from Aymara or peasants to Collas, a term that refers to people of the highlands. The rural population is comprised mainly by Quechua and Aymara immigrants and the Guaraní. The Guaraní are referred to as indigenous population and not as peasants, although their main activity is agriculture. Guaraní people distinguish themselves from the non-Guaraní by naming them as Karay. These categorisations are not formally defined, but are used by all groups as mechanism of differentiation in everyday life. In both low and high differentiated municipalities the position of women is derived from their fathers or husbands. Since access to land remains a main factor that gives order to social relations and social categories in the area, women’s subordination to men’s derives from their access to land only or mainly through men in the family. Women of white-mestizo background in towns concentrate their activities on reproductive and social roles, and there are several examples of women occupying public posts as majors or local judges. Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní women in rural areas are involved in productive activities as well as in reproductive and social ones. In families dedicated to commerce, women play a central role in buying and selling goods. In order to identify and to compare dynamics of power reconfigurations and the role that the interweaving of social ascriptions plays in people’s room

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FIGURE 1: Study area in Chuquisaca, Bolivia

for action I selected four high and four low socially differentiated municipalities in the department of Chuquisaca (Fig. 1). The criteria I used to classify the municipalities as either high or low differentiated were socio-cultural diversity, socio-economic diversity and variation on political party preferences. I classified the municipalities based on statistical data and my own familiarity with the social composition of the municipalities, where I had worked before.

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Sociocultural diversity High differentiated municipalities include at least three self-identified ethnic groups: non-native, Guaraní, and Quechua, while the low differentiated municipalities comprise two main ethnic groups: Quechua and non-native (white-mestizo). The Shannon Diversity Index (SDI) measures diversity of populations in a certain geographic area and the distribution of this diversity. Therefore, it provides more information about community composition than simply richness (i.e. number of groups present); it also takes into account the relative abundance of different groups.5 Table 1 shows the SDI results for the eight studied municipalities. In addition to the self-identification with indigenous and native people reflected in the SDI, language and literacy also underscore the differences between the two categories of municipalities. In high differentiated municipalities, people speak Spanish, Quechua and Guaraní while in low differentiated municipalities people speak Spanish and Quechua, with Quechua dominating over Spanish in Sopachuy and Tomina (Table 1). Regarding literacy rates, high differentiated municipalities have higher percentages of literate people. Due to the fact that Spanish remains the primary language of education, it is reasonable to conclude that in high differentiated municipalities the extreme differences between literate and illiterate people is much higher than in low differentiated municipalities, with the native population among the less literate.

Socio-economic diversity Three socio-economic characteristics distinguish between high and low differentiated municipalities: distribution of land available per family, patterns

5

The Shannon diversity index is measured by the Diversity H and the Evenness EH. The Diversity H measures the diversity of population in a certain geographic area: H=Sum(Pi/P)*ln(Pi/P), where P represents the total number of individuals and n shows the number of groups. The Shannon’s Evenness Index (EH) measures the diversity distribution since it normalises the index H by dividing it by the natural log of the number of groups (Eh=H/ln n). The higher the SDI, the more equal the representation of all groups; the lower the number, the more one ethnic group dominates.

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of consumption expenditures (inequality), and characteristics of migration. In the eight municipalities, most of the working population over ten years of age devotes their activities to agriculture and cattle raising (INE, 2002). Therefore, land availability remains a central factor in socio-economic differentiation. The success of the agrarian reform of 1953 in the higher valleys where the municipalities of Sopachuy, Alcalá, Tomina, and Padilla are situated resulted in a more homogeneous distribution of land among peasants. On the contrary, the agrarian reform was less successful in the east and in the Chaco areas of Chuquisaca due mainly to the high dispersion of the population and the vast geographical areas. Additionally, the strong flows of Quechua immigrants and the ‘granting’ of land from patrones to families working in their haciendas resulted in an increased variety of land sizes in the municipalities of Monteagudo, Huacareta, Muyupampa and Macharetí (ACLO, 1995-1998-2001; HECOP, 2001; CEDEC; 1997; CESBOL, 2001; CESTPRO, PDCR II, 1999; Consultora Reyes, 2001: Universidad NUR, 2001; KADASTER, 1998). With regard to the second socio-economic variable–dispersion of the consumption expenditures (inequality)–there is a higher average consumption per capita in Monteagudo, Huacareta, Muyupampa, and Macharetí (UDAPE, 2004). The presence of indigenous Guaraní in high differentiated municipalities whose income nearly approaches zero due to their subsistence agricultural activities means that the range of expenditure in these municipalities is wider, with the white-mestizo landowners at one extreme and the indigenous Guaraní at the other. Data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE, 2002) confirms differences in the degree of inequality per municipality when placing the eight municipalities of this study in the following decreasing order of inequality: Macharetí, Huacareta, Muyupampa, Monteagudo, Alcalá, Tomina, Padilla and Sopachuy.

Political party preferences Political party preferences as a criteria to classify the municipalities as high or low differentiated showed to be consistent with the degree of social differentiation. In the municipal elections of 1995 and 1999 and the national election of 2002 the MBL (Free Bolivia Movement) won consecutively in the Tomina Province, where the low differentiated municipalities are located. In

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the four high differentiated municipalities, the votes were dispersed among three political parties, with the MNR (National Revolutionary Movement) and the ADN (Democratic Nationalist Action) leading the elections. The relation between ethnic identity (i.e. Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, mestizo) and political party preference is evident in the studied municipalities. The leftist MBL party was present in the rural areas of low differentiated municipalities through the work of NGOs since the 1980s, which may explain the sympathy it enjoys among Quechua population. Winning the elections in 1995 and 1999, the MBL took over the municipal governments in Sopachuy, Alcalá, and Tomina. On the other hand, the ADN was founded by the ex-dictator Hugo Banzer and has historically been close to rightist political views. Ex-hacendados and white-mestizo urban residents appear among their stronger supporters. The MNR still enjoys the support of some groups of middle and peasant classes that remain loyal to the party as the leader of the national revolution of 1952. The increasing importance of the political party MAS created in 1995 explains, among others, the disappearance and weakening of many other political parties.6 During the municipal elections of 2004, MAS won first and second seats in the four low differentiated municipalities and a second and third place in two high differentiated municipalities. Among its stronger supporters appear Aymara immigrants and Quechua peasants. Since 2005, ADN, MBL and MNR have almost disappeared from the political scenario. Table 1 shows the classification of high and low socially differentiated municipalities. The municipalities of Monteagudo and Sopachuy were selected as in-depth cases, while the remaining six broaden the comparison between high and low differentiated municipalities. The following section, describes the changes in the configuration of power relations in high and low differentiated municipalities after the passing of the LPP and how local actors find opportunities as well as constraints in the intersection of their diverse identities.

6

An article in La Razón, (9.3.2011) mentions a list published by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) of 41 disappeared political parties in Bolivia during the last 13 years.

100 100

Tomina

78.4

Alcalá

Padilla

100

Sopachuy

Q and S

S and Q

S and Q

Q and S

S, G and Q

S, G and Q

S, G and Q

S, Q and G

9,060

4,034

12,562

7,241

7,386

10,748

10,007

26,504

0.68

0.69

0.77

0.47

0.91

1.0

0.94

0.78

< 20

< 20

< 20

< 20

> 1000

500-1000

c. 20-500

c. 20-500

Shannon Prevailing land Diversity Index size in ha.

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* Source: INE, census 2001 (last available census) ** Q: Quechua; G: Guaraní and S: Spanish

Low Differentiated Municipalities

100

78.0

100

Macharetí

Muyupampa

Huacareta

Monteagudo

No. of inhabitants

13:41

High Differentiated Municipalities

72.5

Municipality

Spoken languages in order of importance**

1/3/13

Classification

Inhabitants living in rural areas in percent

TABLE 1 Classification and characteristics of selected municipalities*

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COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CHANGES IN POWER RELATIONS BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW DIFFERENTIATED MUNICIPALITIES

High differentiated municipalities The historical development of the region determined the predominance of Spaniard descendants as big landowners under the hacienda system. Lately, this same group and other urban white-mestizos took over spaces as political figures in peasant unions, civic committees, and as part of directive and technical staff in the main development regional organisations and local cooperatives. With the passing of the LPP the municipal governments and the new created vigilance committees, acquired political and social relevance. Supported by their links to political party members in the big cities and their privileged access to information, many landowner descendants–mainly professionals–occupied the political, technical, and representative spaces in the municipal government and vigilance committees. Although they face competence from younger groups of professionals, all of them belong to the same group dominated by males of white-mestizo origin. Some professional women gained access to the municipal government, but occupy a minority of seats. Many of them expressed not to be considered as seriously as a male authority by their own male colleagues and by the technical staff. For example, the access to vehicles to visit surrounding villages or to economic resources to attend training seminars is approved more easily for male authorities than for female ones. After the LPP the Guaraní population won a minimum but novel representation in the municipal government. However, an internal struggle emerged as many of them consider that their interest and even their organisations face political party cooptation because their capacity to organise and take their own decisions appears still weak after centuries of submission. As for the majority of poor peasants, no cohesive ideological or organisational force represents them; their political preferences and loyalties are dispersed among different parties and even local personalities. As implicit from above, it is possible to affirm that the balance of power has barely changed in the four high differentiated municipalities as privileged male white-mestizo still dominate as candidates, particularly in Huacareta, Muyupampa, and Macharetí. Most candidates belong to white-mestizo landowners. In Monteagudo, urban social figures and professionals dominate political posts. Furthermore, the mechanisms applied to hold their privileged

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positions are not new but only adapted: clientelist relations with regional and national political party tiers, privileged access to information, and increasing domination through a bureaucratic and developmental discourse assumed as modern and efficient. The church, the NGOs, and the international donors themselves play a role in reinforcing the distribution of power among white-mestizos. By channelling privileged information and training to male leaders, urban dwellers and councillors, they strengthen their position. This improves the function of the bureaucratic procedures of decentralisation, but widens even more the gap between the uninformed population and their leaders. In the case of Quechua peasants who live in small communities far from the core towns, information flows very often through nearby big landowners who influence peasants’ decisions according to their own interest. Far from being “victims” of the landowners, the peasants adopt practical decisions by conforming with, and not confronting, the neighbour’s views. This occurs nonetheless because the means of their underprivileged position lays in historical discourses of white-mestizo superiority propagated by the institutionalisation of their power through developmental and democratic organisations such as municipal governments themselves. Peasant women have even less access to information because many of them do not understand Spanish and only the few who do not have a male member in the family are welcomed in communal meetings. Information reaches them through their husbands, fathers or sons. Municipal authorities explain that economic resources are limited and only communal leaders, who are mainly male, can be invited to the informative meetings. Additionally to these limitations, Guaraní women face the constraint of less or no familiarity with development and democracy discourses. In this sociopolitical and developmental constellation, the most disadvantaged by their ethnic, gender, and even geographical location find no cohesive force to identify with; not even a clear figure of the agents responsible of their subordination.

Low differentiated municipalities The Agrarian Reform Law of 1953 showed to be a critical historical juncture in these municipalities because it dismantled the hacienda system dominated by white-mestizo, distributed land among the Quechua population and pro-

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moted the formation of strong peasant unions as well as cohesive class identification as peasants. People in towns and former big landowners who remained in smaller properties kept their social privileges as well as political representation but exerted no more power in peasant communities. After the LPP passed, the alliances between peasant unions, NGOs, and political parties allowed the expansion of political representation and power from the rural areas towards the municipality as a whole. As a result, they introduced a peasant mayor and several male and female indigenous Quechua councillors in Sopachuy, Tomina, Padilla and Alcalá. They particularly benefit from information, training and a modest income. The municipality of Padilla is an exception to the Quechua dominance in public representation in spite of its large proportion of Quechua population (55%). This seems to be explained by the central location of the municipality in the main road between Sucre and Monteagudo. This allows easy access to the communities for political parties and the permanence in town of many white-mestizo who enjoy several basic services. In the four low differentiated municipalities political gains of the indigenous peasant population are at risk because of two factors. One is their prevalent lower social status due mainly to their lower access to financial, education, health and sanitation services as a result of still-prevalent colonial prejudices. The social subordination of the Quechua still persists in everyday relations with the white-mestizo. The latter often take some Quechua children under their patronage, or even take adult people into compadrazgo (godfather) relations in which the indigenous perform free menial tasks for the compadres. White-mestizo address indigenous Quechua as hijo (son) and through the informal “you” while the Quechua refer to the former as “Don” in the formal “you”. The second factor is the increasing relevance of professionalism in the application of the LPP. While this is easily handled by the white-mestizo in high-differentiated municipalities, in the low differentiated ones the hiring of foreign urban-oriented technicians is required, technicians who may or may not share the political commitment towards the indigenous people’s interests.

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Some major comparisons may be drawn from the interviews, group meetings, direct observation and documentation collected during the eight

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months of field work and the assessment of the local actor’s positions derived from their ethnic, gender, occupational and rural-urban backgrounds. This section answers the main research question of the study: How did local actors from high and low differentiated municipalities re-create dynamics of power relations in the framework of the LPP? Second, it describes the re-configuration or power relations in the three dimensions set by the study: representation, influence over decisions that affect the entire municipal population, and control over local government’s performance.

Changes in power relations The study showed that the application of the LPP has opened new ways to change local power relations, particularly when social cohesion among less privileged ethnic lines and political commitment pre-exists. This is the strong perception of men and women peasants in Sopachuy and to a lesser extent in the other three less differentiated municipalities. In these municipalities the Quechua population took councillors’ and mayors’ seats and widened their participation in municipal affairs. Before the LPP, the political power in the rural areas of Sopachuy was dominated by the Quechua population. The white-mestizo enjoyed political dominance and social power in the urban areas. After the LPP, the political power of the municipality has gone into the hands of the Quechua population. Some gains in more equal social relations are evident among new indigenous leaders and the urban population. The interweaving identities of the Quechua population of rural residence and occupation as peasant workers it is no more at odds with their identification as authorities in political public life in the core towns. Thanks to the political discourse of NGOs and political parties committed to the Quechua population, Quechua women are integrated in general assemblies and as candidates in electoral lists. However, indigenous women in the municipal government face more criticism than their white-mestizo female colleagues, because resistance from whitemestizos addresses their interwoven gender and ethnic backgrounds. Due to their lower literacy levels and understanding of the technical and bureaucratic procedures, indigenous Quechua women in office are captured between the demands to fulfil a female quota and the pressure to perform as municipal authorities. Arrieta (1995, 60) accurately pointed out that “[i]t is

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easier for an Aymará such as Víctor Hugo Cárdenas (ex-vice president) to be seated besides the president of the Republic in the cabinet than an indigenous person to be seated in a municipal council of a village”. After more than a decade, reality shows that it is easier for an indigenous male to be president of the nation than for a woman to be seated as the head of a peasant union. In Monteagudo, both before and after the LPP social and political domains have been dominated by the white-mestizo population. The LPP has broadened the popular power base, but this was mainly overtaken by the white-mestizos through better access to education, information, contacts and control over the development discourse. Women in these municipalities are also the ones who face the bigger challenges as local authorities. Even as elected representatives they often suffer political violence in the form of psychological pressure to leave their seats and are hampered in fulfilling their professional duties. Quechua and Aymara immigrants and the Guaraní have had minimum representation in the municipal government of the four high differentiated municipalities and they often see their demands diluted during the planning process of specific public works. Peasants and Guaraníes in the high differentiated municipalities are not only at the bottom of the social hierarchy but continue discriminating against each other. Peasants describe themselves as more “civilised” and Christians than the Guaraní, while the latter differentiated themselves proudly from the peasants and the white-mestizo. This mutual discrimination opens spaces for the white-mestizo to maintain their social predominance and to translate it into political power through their candidates.

Political representation In Sopachuy, the Quechua population who inhabit rural communities and is organised along communal peasant unions is strongly represented and play a central role in local politic. Peasant leaders participate in the selection of candidates who enjoy massive support during elections thanks to the strong cohesion and discipline of the peasant unions. A small number of white-mestizo authorities with urban residence occupy public offices as a result of votes in the core town. However, their influence is limited to intro-

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duce some infrastructure and basic service’s projects. In Monteagudo, on the contrary, urban male white-mestizo professionals dominate the municipal government. For them, gender, ethnicity and urban residence are interdependent factors which result in privileged access to information and education and links to political regional and national networks. On the contrary, for the Aymara and Quechua population dispersed in rural areas in small or medium plots or as temporary workers ethnic, occupational or rural location background do not correspond to any specific political party preference. Therefore, they are not represented in municipal governments but their votes are often co-opted by several political parties. As for the Guaraní, ethnicity plays a clear role in electing their municipal authorities and they are represented in some municipal governments. However, Guaraní councillors and interviewees alike expressed that there is little or nothing what Guaranís in municipal governments can do to address not only their basic needs but also their need to organise themselves after centuries of servitude and discrimination.

Influence over local decisions and the participative planning process In Sopachuy, participation in the planning process is directly related to being a representative of Quechua origin, member of a peasant union and of rural residence. Although participation in the massive peasant union’s meetings where the municipal government informs about the planning process is open, only the ones who address the assembly in Quechua and are known for their sympathy towards peasants’ supported political party are heard by the dominated Quechua audience. Women are encouraged to take active part in the meetings and they attend them in big numbers, but mostly remain shy and silent. On the contrary, in Monteagudo, the municipal government dominated by white-mestizo professionals is concerned with efficiency and efficacy rather than with strengthening peoples’ participation. Among municipal councillors and regional representatives there is the perception that they know better than the local population what the latter really need. This corresponds to the perception shared by most white-mestizo in the municipality that Guaraní are not responsible enough for their own freedom of choice and that peasants do not care enough for the region. Women’s participation in local planning remains low in Monteagudo, except for the

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few female councillors and members of the vigilance committee who express to face male resistance while in office. Therefore, ethnic, gender and ruralurban residence backgrounds play an important role in having a say in local planning in both kinds of municipalities.

Mechanism of control over the municipal governments performance Grass-roots control through the vigilance committee and communal organisations are more effective in Sopachuy than in Monteagudo. The LPP allowed indigenous peasants to take over positions in the vigilance committee and to exert surveillance not only over their municipal authorities but also over other service providers in the health and education sectors and NGO’s projects. Individual initiatives to control public works, however, are much more limited because of the collective nature of the control. On the other hand, in Monteagudo, political party competition is the most effective mechanism of control and it is exerted mainly as a top-down process from councillors and political sympathisers.

The case of other municipalities The cases of Huacareta, Muyupampa, and Macharetí as high differentiated municipalities and Padilla, Tomina, and Alcalá as low differentiated ones show the same tendencies as the in-depth cases of Monteagudo and Sopachuy except for the municipality of Padilla. In Padilla, professionals are emerging as the group with political and social power and the paternalistic and patron-like relationship from the urban population towards the indigenous population appears to remain unchanged. The conclusions of Nijenhuis (2002, 116) in regard to other municipalities of Chuquisaca relate closely to the findings above. She mentions that in the municipalities of Presto, Sopachuy, and Poroma, direct participation has increased, “but in the municipalities of Huacareta and Monteagudo it is still the traditional elite that controls local government.” Presto and Poroma, which remain outside the scope of my study, fall under the classification of “low differentiated municipalities” because of their Quechua sociocultural domination (94.7% and 94.8% of Quechua population respectively).

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Although the political preference is disperse in these municipalities, the process of agrarian reform took place with force there and peasant unions as well as some traditional indigenous organisations (Ayllus) enjoyed strong political and social leverage before the LPP passed. This opens room for considering a pattern or group of characteristics as a base to attempt a classification of Bolivian municipalities and relate them with the outcomes of development interventions, including democratic decentralisation.

CONCLUSIONS The study shows that state reforms can lead both to the reinforcement of old power relations and to their transformation in favour of hitherto excluded groups. It depends on the historically grown political constellations in the various municipalities which of these two outcomes is to be expected. Social categories and their interweaving are built and transformed over time, sometimes in dramatic historical events such as the revolution of 1952, the agrarian reform of 1953 and colonisation flows in the studied municipalities. One implication of this finding is that the weight of historical development in local contexts cannot be ignored when applying uniform political reforms or when considering project design and implementation. The study also shows that white-mestizo males from urban residence still comprise the most privileged group due to their gender, ethnic and residence background. Unless political parties look for candidates among less privileged groups and then support them throughout the electoral campaigns and the government periods, they will contribute to perpetuate inequalities among residence, ethnic and gender lines. The role of political parties in Monteagudo is an example of the idealisation of candidates as white-mestizo males and professionals who are perceived as “the most suitable” representatives. On the other extreme of social idealisation, rural females from all indigenous backgrounds are dismissed as candidates because of their low social profile. The political action of local actors such as political parties and NGO members proves essential for indigenous’ and women’s empowerment in the political arena. They may include actions in various fronts such as to promote indigenous and women’s participation in development programmes; to ensure land property particularly for small and medium peasants and for

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women; to facilitate markets for agricultural products; to promote acknowledgment and respect among diverse ethnic groups; and to ensure distribution of services and information in both urban and rural areas, among others. Key actors such as local NGOs, the international community and the church contribute to these ends but some of them continue dismissing the issue of power in pursuing development goals and exacerbate local patterns of inequality and discriminatory relations.

REFERENCES ACLO. “Plan de desarrollo participativo del municipio de Huacareta”. Huacareta, Volumes I, II, 1995. — “Plan de desarrollo municipal del municipio de Sopachuy”. Sopachuy, 1998. — “Plan de desarrollo municipal del municipio de Alcalá.” Volumes I, II. Alcalá, 2001. AROCENA, José. El desarrollo local: un desafío contemporáneo. Caracas; Montevideo: Nueva Sociedad; Centro Latinoamericano de Economía Humana 1995. ARRIETA, Mario. “Reforma del Estado y Desarrollo Rural”. Desarrollo Rural en los Andes. Centro Andino de Acción Popular. Costa Rica: ALOP 1995. 44-68. AYO, Diego. Municipalismo Participación Popular. Apuntes de un proceso. La Paz: Muela del Diablo 2003. BALOGUN, M. J. “The scope for popular participation in decentralisation, community governance, and development. Towards a new paradigm of center-periphery relations”. Regional Development Dialogue. 21.1 (2000): 153-173. BLAIR, Harry. “Participation and Accountability in the Periphery: Democratic Local Governance in Six Countries.” World Development, 28.1 (2000): 21-39. BOISIER, Sergio. “La Descentralización: Un tema difuso y confuso.” Serie Ensayos. Document 90/05, Santiago: Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Planificación Económica ILPES 1990. CEDEC. “Plan de desarrollo municipal del municipio de Padilla.” Padilla, 1997. CESBOL. “Ajuste al plan de desarrollo municipal de Sopachuy.” Sopachuy, 2001. CESTPRO, and PDCR II. “Plan de desarrollo municipal del municipio de Villa Vaca Guzmán (Muyupampa)”. Villa Vaca Guzmán, 1999. COLLIER, Ruth B., and David COLLIER. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2002. CONSULTORA REYES. “Plan de desarrollo municipal del municipio de Tomina.” Volumes I, II. Tomina, 2001.

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CROOK, Richard, and J. MANOR. Democracy and Decentralisation in South Asia and West Africa. Participation, Accountability and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998. CROOK, Richard, and Alan STURLA. Decentralisation and Poverty-Alleviation in Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis or, is West Bengal Unique? Brighton: Institute of Development Studies 2001. FOX, Jonathan. “The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship: Lessons from Mexico.” World politics, 46.2 (1994): 151-184. FUNDACIÓN CEIBO. Plan de desarrollo municipal del municipio de Alcalá. Alcalá, 2001. HADENIUS, Axel. “Decentralisation and Democratic Governance.” Decentralisation and Democratic Governance. Experiences from India, Bolivia and South Africa. Ed. Axel Hadenius. Stockholm: EGDI 2003. 1-12. HECOP. “Ajuste al plan de desarrollo municipal de Padilla.” Padilla, 2001. JOHNSON, Craig. Johnson, C. “Local Democracy, Democratic Decentralisation and Rural Development: Theories, Challenges and Options for Policy.” Development Policy Review, 19 (2001): 521-532. KADASTER. “Formas Consuetudinarias de Propiedad y Tenencia de la Tierra en el Departamento de Chuquisaca”. Internal Report. La Paz, 1998. LONG, Norman. Development Sociology. Actor perspectives. London: Routledge 2001. PDCR II. Plan de desarrollo municipal “San Pablo de Huacareta”. Huacareta, 1999. L A RAZÓN. Se extinguieron 41 partidos políticos. Web. 9 March 2011. . ROJAS, Gonzalo. “Modernización, democracia y participación”. El pulso de la democracia: participación ciudadana y descentralización en Bolivia. Ed. Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad 1997. 239-246. RONDINELLI, Dennis, J. S. MCCULLOUGH, and Ronald JOHNSON. “Analysing Decentralisation Policies in Developing Countries: a Political-Economy Framework.” Development and Change, 20 (1989): 57-87. SCHÖNWÄLDER, Gerd. “New Democratic Spaces at the Grassroots? Popular Participation in Latin American Local Governments.” Development and Change, Vol. 28 (1997): 753-770. SCOTT, John. Stratification and Power. Structures of Class, Status and Command. Cambridge: Polity Press 1996. TREISMAN, Daniel. “Decentralisation and the quality of government.” Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles. 2000. Web. 25 Nov. 2004. NATIONAL STATISTICAL INSTITUTE. “Resultados del Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda 2001”. La Paz. 2002.

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— and UNIDAD DE ANÁLISIS DE POLÍTICAS ECONÓMICAS Y SOCIALES (UDAPE). “Bolivia: Mapa de Pobreza 2001”. La Paz, 2002. NIJENHUIS, Gery. “Decentralisation and Popular Participation in Bolivia. The Link Between Local Governance and Local Development.” Utrecht: Geographical Institute 2002. UNIVERSIDAD NUR. Plan de desarrollo municipal de Monteagudo. Volumes I, II, 2001.

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CREATING A FEELING OF BELONGING: CONSUMER CITIZENSHIP AS A MEDIA PROJECT

Olena Prykhodko

ABSTRACT The notion of “citizenship” is changing rapidly and the image that is then conveyed through the media often drops out of sight in political and legal studies, but nevertheless it succeeds in influencing our everyday lives and our experiences of “citizenship”. Therefore, it is crucial to see how the contemporary media add to the re-constitution and re-construction of citizenship within both the cultural field and everyday experiences. As a media example I will use one of the most popular reality shows in Germany, “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”. The analysis aims at exploring the interactive ways of constructing consumer citizens, who are simultaneously “produced by” and “produce themselves” at the intersection of gender, ethnicity and class and at researching how feelings of belonging to a certain community is conveyed and constructed.

CONSUMER OR CITIZEN? CITIZENSHIP BETWEEN DISCOURSES OF CONSUMPTION AND CIVIC DUTIES

Feeling of belonging Belonging can be defined in terms of space, of place, of religion, of ethnicity or nationality. This list can be continued, but recently belonging has become the focus of research interest not in terms of defining where one belongs, but rather how one belongs. Under precarious neoliberal conditions belonging has become one of the key terms to describe modern anxiety (Geschiere, 2009; Ilcan, 2002). This is not surprising, since belonging means having security and a certain space where one can feel safe and desired. In this respect Zygmunt Bauman asserts that “‘[b]elonging’ translates as confidence in the benefits of human solidarity, and of institutions that arise out of that solidarity and promise to serve it and assure its reliability” (Bauman, 2010, 41). Thus, belonging is never a matter of isolation or of individuality; it is

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always about some sociality and relations with others (Probyn, 1996; Ilcan, 2002). In these terms, belonging to a place is never defined through a place itself, but rather through the “experience of being connected in and between sites of social relations” (Ilcan, 2002, 3). The feeling of belonging, in this sense, means that a person feels attached to specific community, group or nation, for example, where they feel welcome and recognised as an integral part of it. A feeling of belonging defines a community and its members’ commitment to it. In these terms “citizenship is probably most immediately experienced as a feeling of belonging” (Osler and Starkey, 2005, 9; cf. Kirsch, 1995). A feeling of belonging also reflects upon an individual desire and a sense of whether one belongs or not, which is especially important in the context of citizenship, where legal recognition in the national community does not necessarily mean acceptance as Lim (2006) shows. In this way, a feeling of belonging is a precondition for participative citizenship (Osler and Starkey, 2005). Within globalisation processes a feeling of belonging somewhere becomes hard to achieve due to migration processes, changes of space and communities, and constant movement. This creates anxiety and insecurities regarding where one belongs and a further desire for belonging (Ilcan, 2002). It impacts on citizenship, which is founded on feelings of belonging.

Citizenship and community Though citizenship is predominantly seen as a vibrant topic within political and legal studies, cultural and social studies are demonstrating an increasing interest in citizenship as well (Somers, 2008). Within the political and legal fields of study, citizenship has been taken for granted as something given at birth and has been embraced in terms of individual rights, privileges and duties (Bellamy, 2008; Abraham, 2008). Traditionally, such citizenship was also defined in terms of membership of a particular political community (Somers, 2008; Alexander, 2008). Such an attitude was shaped by the fact that, because “the modern state has been typically a national state, citizenship is derived ultimately from membership by birth within an ethnic community, where the entitlement to citizenship is typically inherited from parents” (Turner, 2001, 11) and it resulted in comprehending citizenship in an abstract and universal form. However, nowadays such a position can hardly persist and we are witnessing a change in the focal points of research and

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attempts to accommodate the term within major global developments, where migration and the transformation of class and gender roles start to play a significant role. Gender, race, ethnicity, and class have become essential categories for research on the notion of citizenship (Yuval-Davis, 2009; Adamson, et al., 2011; Extra, et al. (eds.), 2009; Castle and Davidson, 2000; Cantle, 2005; Lister, 2004) and its effects in creating a feeling of belonging (Dahlgren, 2003; Rogers and Muir, 2007; Bauman, 2010; Geschiere, 2009; Lim, 2006) and cannot be neglected any more, neither by research nor by politics. These transformations have resulted in attempts to situate and to analyse citizenship within wider social and cultural contexts, thus distancing the research from understanding citizenship as an abstract or exclusively political or legal term. One crucial issue, which remains at the centre of numerous debates for scholars, is the reconnection of citizenship and community. Without a doubt, citizenship has always been closely associated with community and community building, since citizenship has long been considered to be an organising principle of a political community (Somers, 2008; Alexander, 2008). In its turn, community and acceptance within it, becomes a major factor for recognisable and approved citizenship. This bond continues to be important for modern citizenship as well, though there are definite extensions to that. As Bryan S. Turner indicates in this regard: Community membership and personal identity are obviously cultural attributes to modern citizenship, and civic culture can be defined as a cultural arena of citizenship practices, which interpellate citizens and categorize individual behavior within a code of public values and virtues (Turner, 2001, 12).

Thus, culture has become an important actor that defines the bond between citizenship and community and helps us rethink community in terms not solely political or social, but also cultural (Delanty, 2010). However, this change has not always been reflected in discussions on the decline of citizenship and some scholars consider the decline of community engagement in the political sense to be a sign of decline in the meaning of citizenship (Bauman, 2007; Rogers and Muir, 2007; Humphery, 2010; Baudrillard, 2008). Alarm about the deterioration of community and its principles of functioning is perceived as a result of individualisation and the decline of collectivity and, thus, of solidarity. Such fears are closely related to the cur-

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rent general development of culture. Furthermore, economic factors and the global financial order now intrude fiercely into the development of community and citizenship as well as into the development of culture and everyday life. Within these intersections, the contemporary media add to the re-constitution and re-construction of citizenship and community. They create a space where the political and legal fields connect to the cultural field and to everyday experiences. Under these circumstances not only the community itself is transformed, but also the very notion of citizenship and its ties with community is being transformed. If we regard a community as a collectivity with common cultural, social and political interests, membership of which is determined by particular rules and regulations and where exclusion is a principle of access to its resources and benefits, community is far from vanishing, though it is undergoing considerable revision. In this respect, it can be productive to scrutinise the transformations which community has been undergoing through the mediatisation and globalisation of culture and how community has been reinvented and revived using the notion of citizenship. The nexus that makes these terms function in connection to each other is the feeling of belonging that is characteristic to both of them.

Citizenship as a learning process As a result of the assumed inability of political citizenship to integrate and accommodate to modern global developments (Trentmann, 2007; Alexander, 2008; Osler and Starkey, 2005), there is a tendency to theorise about cultural citizenship that has gained popularity in cultural scholarship. As Turner states, such citizenship serves, first of all, “as cultural empowerment, namely the capacity to participate effectively, creatively, and successfully within a national culture” (Turner, 2001, 12). Another important tendency is the revision of political citizenship as such, where cultural and personal aspects become an important element in relation to political ones (Starkey, 2002; Turner, 2001). It leads to the conceptualisation of citizenship not as a birthright, but rather as the acquired knowledge of how to correctly perform citizenship, of how the community functions, and of how citizenship can be performed in future. With these tendencies, a new notion of citizenship has started to dominate both academia and politics. Namely, citizenship is now understood as a

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process of learning/internalising values and traditions as well as the rights and responsibilities embedded in them (Osler and Starkey, 2005; Audigier, 2000; Olssen, et al., 2004). Within this discourse on citizenship as education, Hugh Starkey distinguishes three broad categories of a citizen’s competences to succeed in their performance of citizenship: cognitive competencies, affective competencies and the choice of values, and skills associated with understanding and supporting human rights. Affective competencies such as social competencies, the capacity to live with others, to co-operate, to construct and implement joint projects, to take on responsibilities, the capacity to resolve conflicts in accordance with the principles of democratic law, the capacity to take part in public debate, to develop an argument and to learn to choose in a real life situation, all occupy a central place in community building (Starkey, 2002, 17). Therefore, one important aspect of such a ‘learning citizenship’ is how one can make oneself useful and productive to the society within which one lives. The crucial issue of this approach, which remains present throughout the discourse of cultural citizenship, is the assumption that individuals are ignorant of their social, moral and political responsibilities. Thus, they need to learn how to appropriately perform their citizenship and how belonging functions in a community that is defined by citizenship. Such a reformulation of citizenship as a learning process relates also to Foucault’s idea that productivity and the well-being of the contemporary national state depends on the well-being, growth and productivity of its citizens (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). Such learning supposedly aims at the very creation of well-being and productivity through the feeling of belonging to the community, which accompanies the mastering of affective competencies.

Transformation of a role of citizenship Laurie Ouellette and James Hay argue that with the rise of neoliberalism, where governmental technologies have become part of the everyday, there is no longer a necessity for direct governmental control and intrusion. Citizens should learn to control and manage themselves according to already existing rules (Clarke, et al., 2007). However, what kinds of citizens are imagined here? We are witnessing a crucial change in the role of the citizen: a citizen who actively consumes dominates the notion of citizenship today; spectator-

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ship is turning into a civic duty (Lewis, et al., 2005; Ouellette, 1999). However, the meaning of consumption itself has been modified. It no longer relies on a passive and manipulated consumer, but on active consumers who make themselves in turn consumable. They thus turn into producers of the self for the means of consumption (Bauman, 2007). At first sight, the idea of citizenship as education and learning is opposed to the idea of this nexus between consumers and citizen. For instance, John Clarke, et al. observe that “the citizen and the consumer embody a series of binary distinctions” (Clarke, et al., 2007, 3). However, such incompatibility and binarism disappears when one analyses consumption not simply as an individual choice, but as a contemporary social arrangement (Bauman, 2007; Trentmann, 2007). In this regard, Tauel Harper’s statement that “[t]he central element of consumer citizenship is that citizens’ democratic rights extend to consumption” (Harper, 2010, 155) can be considered central. However, having become a right, consumption has also turned into an obligation and has begun to dominate other rights and duties (Harper, 2010). In a consumer society, “‘to consume’ […] means to invest in one’s own social membership” (Bauman, 2007, 56). Moreover, consumption also serves as an instrument to create a feeling of belonging to the society, especially for those members whose feeling of belonging could be described as precarious (Bosch, 2010). Thus, to become a member of society, and even more, a citizen, one must consume and learn how to consume. Such tendencies have found their most vivid reflection in a specific cultural phenomenon: reality and casting shows. It is not surprising that the consumer citizen, as a major social actor, has assumed the primary role in the strategy to create a feeling of belonging in reality shows. The encouragement, even requirement, for citizens to be able to calculate and manage their risks on their own, without relying on the help of the state is one characteristic of the new politics under neoliberal conditions (Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Weber, 2009). In this respect, TV has taken on the important role of providing numerous reality shows to ‘teach’ a citizen how to assess, control and manage such risks. In these terms, reality television can be regarded not as a contingent phenomenon, but rather as a cultural technology under neoliberal conditions (Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Stauff, 2005), one which serves to reflect the new governing technologies. Reality television thus reflects upon strategies of achieving the status of citizen as well as upon what it means to be a ‘good’ consumer citizen (Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Weber, 2009;

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Thomas, 2008). Such citizens are conceptualised as law-abiding, hard-working, financially independent, health-conscious and consuming in the ‘right’ ways. They are also unproblematic and sustain the system through their acceptable and correct behaviour both towards the government and towards their fellow citizens. Ouellette and Hay see, in the emergence of such subjectivity, first of all, a general deterioration of the welfare state and population management, which suggests that individuals are disciplined into care of self in order to free the state financially as well as becoming more manageable through suggested self-discipline. Thus, consumer citizens should take care of themselves, learn to manage risk, and support themselves economically, not relying on the help of third parties. In this regard, analysing the German reality casting show Deutschland sucht den Superstar (Germany seeks the Superstar, DSDS), I will argue that the identity of consumer citizenship closely relates to the idea of turning one’s identity into a resource and a product for sale. As one’s own individuality turns into a commodity it is furthermore seen as a source of financial profit. Therefore, such characteristics as gender, ethnicity and class become a consumable part of individuality and can be managed according to current market needs and become a source of income. From this, I will turn to exploring different bodily strategies employed in the show to analyse how gender, ethnic belonging, and class as identity parameters are subsumed into a feeling of belonging through the idea of consumer citizenship.

DSDS AS A DISCURSIVE FIELD OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND PERFORMANCE

Certainly the thoroughly praised identity of a consumer citizen can be found in all reality shows (and other media formats as well). However as for my empirical material I focus on one of the most popular reality and casting shows, the German DSDS, a song contest, for several reasons. Firstly, the show has been at the top of the ratings for such types of shows for many years. Secondly, the show differs from others of the kind in that it has turned into an industry in itself and has become a brand. The Bertelsmann group, to whom the show belongs, has created an image of the show as an “all encompassing media event” (Hickethier, 2003). Thirdly, the show emphasises the value of diversity and can be seen as representing one kind type of

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vehicles for modern ideas of diversity management. Thus, an analysis of the way ‘diversity’ is reflected and performed in the show can be helpful to understanding the roots of the show within neoliberal economics and as a reflection of consumer citizenship in this context. Fourthly, DSDS offers a format built on the intersection of several formats and broadcasting techniques which are employed in the different selection procedures. It helps analyse the functions of the different types of formats frequently used in reality TV within one programme and to interrogate the effects such intersections produce. For an in-depth analysis of constructing a feeling of belonging I decided to concentrate on one season in details and chose Season 5 (2008). This was the last season before RTL agreed to apply voluntary self-control of DSDS content, as a result of a case brought by the Commission for Youth Media Protection, which sued RTL for presenting insulting content and falsely presenting normality. This also made the season a particularly interesting subject for investigation.

GENDER AS A PRODUCT FOR SALE: A ‘SUCCESSFUL’ BODY Body interventions The construction of a consumer citizen puts gender to the fore. Its manageability depends on the candidates’ ability to create a clear gender identity and to manage it to their own benefit, according to the demands of the market. At the very beginning, the show conveys a definite message what kind of a woman and what kind of a man is needed, or rather desired, as a product in our society. This approach is employed by DSDS in relation to several major factors central for the staging of gender as a consumable feature, such as appearance, narratives, song and style choice, and embodied performance strategies. Body plays a crucial role in the construction of a gendered self, which strives to be integrated in an imagined community of the successful society, presumably presented through DSDS. Body becomes an object for the stylisation of belonging by accommodating it to the demands of consumability as well as to the demands of the society regarding how a ‘healthy’ body–the major conveyed characteristic of a consumable body–should be expressed: it includes weight, body shape, gendered beauty standards and

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caring for the self. Therefore, body interventions, which aim at the creation of gendered bodies and at the renaturalisation of the body as a resource, become central to the show. As a way of accommodating one’s body to the gendered demands of the market, judges recommend such interventions to candidates as a way of directing them in how to perform being a woman or a man. This starts during the castings and continues to the final show. Thus the following typical dialogue reflects the techniques employed as well as the emphasis on how candidates benefit from them: Dieter Bohlen (a judge): You, cutie, may I say one more thing? Can you purchase contact lenses for the Recall? Joana Haucke (a candidate): I will take care, ok. Anja Lukaseder (a judge): You are indeed a beautiful girl. (Casting 5, all translations by the author)

The judges formulate their advice for Joana to get rid of her glasses by using the dichotomy of ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’, where ‘glasses’ stand for a physical deficiency (short-sightedness) that needs to be corrected, to be made invisible, to vanish. This deficiency is something that one cannot easily turn into consumable, into one’s advantage that can lead to success. Therefore, the best way to deal with one’s body is to structure it in a more consumable way. Thus when Joana appears for the Recall with contact lenses, she is verbally encouraged by the judges, who now officially recognise her beauty as well as her performed transformation of herself. However her attempt to distance herself from their decision and her own transformed self fail: Bohlen: We have told you at once that you are a totally beautiful girl … Joana: I did it especially for you Bohlen: Only for … nee, you wouldn’t have needed to do it for us. I believe indeed, that it’s good for you. Joana: Yeah, definitely. Bohlen: OK!?? (Recall 1)

Her explicit indication that she changed her appearance for the judges initiates a strict and immediate response on the judge’s part with a clear statement that it is for her, not his, benefit. In this way, the judges position themselves as ‘neutral’ advisors who are helping their subjects to find the right way to present their identity. In turn, this consumability indicates their belonging

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to a society of consumers. There a certain shift is to observe. At the beginning ‘voice’ serves presumably an important prerequisite for participation. However, then the shift occurs from voice as natural ability to gender identity as a cultural product. Such shift takes place exactly with change of the format from castings to recalls, where a process of learning how to become part of a community starts. The importance of transformation of self becomes central here. The results of this learning process and its evaluation are also expressed through a change of format in the show. The next stage after the recalls is the Top 15 Show, where the emphasis is on the ability of candidates to present their gendered bodily selves to the viewers: Dieter Bohlen: So, before we said voice, voice, voice. But now we want to offer people something for the eyes and I believe here we have a couple of tasty girls, cool guys. (Top 15 Show)

A very typical treatment of such statements is an explicit appeal to the economic vocabulary of supply and demand, where a constructed part of the identity (body), not a natural one (voice), is the product on offer. In terms of life intervention strategies, candidates learn that their body is a construct and they are constructors. However, the judges remain in their role of ‘interventionists’ who know what type of body is wanted. Any bodily ‘faults’, or failures to implement the recommended interventions, are seen as resulting from a lack of discipline or lack of desire for a ‘healthy body’. As a consequence, such faulty bodies are excluded from the community: physical ability is a must for those, who want to belong; it is an expression of their desire to belong. The programme makes an intense appeal to the body as a metaphor in its construction of success in society. Though the main common usage is related to the heart (e.g. “I am so relieved, that’s a load off my mind (in German: heart)”), there is always a return to body as a whole unit, which is intensified in the course of the programme (shivering, trembling, pulsating, pain, etc.).

Clear gender roles: gender as a biological attribute Here a paradox occurs: on the one hand, a gendered body is shown as a construct, thus, as something culturally and socially molded, on the other hand,

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body interventions aim at re-biologising gender. Here, another essential factor comes into play. The show emphasises sex rather than gender in its interpretation of the roles women and men occupy in our society. It accompanies the body interventions to intensify a clearly gendered division. Clear gender roles are expected from candidates as a statement of the self, which one of the candidates, Benni Herd, perfectly exemplifies in his narrative: Benni Herd (a candidate): My name is Benjamin Herd, I come from Worms and I am 16. I am one meter sixty tall and I have a fighting weight of 55 kilos. I think the world of women adores such guys as I am. If it deals with real machos, then I am indeed a “little macho” and I believe if my girlfriend didn’t cook, then I would, I believe, die. … The most important is my family! (hugs only his father, Casting 3)

Such narrative construction is the rule rather than the exception. This narrative is only one example of the masculinity discourse in the show. Despite the fact that masculinity has been pluralised and cannot be understood only within macho scheme, for the show hegemonic masculine and feminine patterns are dominant, making possible plurality disappear. This masculinity and femininity needs to demonstrate consistency throughout the show and such narratives serve to support candidates in their chosen roles. It is also fiercely sustained by the jury in its validity and its power, through compliments and positive judgments as well as being encouraged as a strategy of self-presentation on the way to success. However, another apparent paradox arises here: on the one hand, stereotypical and biologically determined gender roles are appreciated, but on the other hand, since gender turns into a competence to manage and to successfully employ, there is room for deviation from the established norms, if such deviation is demanded by the market.

Gendering judges: Pop Titan, Mother Theresa, and the Bear There is no wonder that the constellation of the jury also represents a specific gender discourse that reinforces the idea of a person’s gender identity as related closely to biology. It rests upon a known formula, which suggests traditional patterns ‘male professionalism’ vs. ‘female emotionalism’ and ‘male bonding’ vs. ‘female sympathy and mediation skills’. The jury team itself has a typical

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popular combination, distinctive for many shows of the genre: two men and one woman. In Season 5 the jury consisted of Dieter Bohlen (a permanent jury member), Anja Lukaseder, and Andreas Läsker (known also as ‘Bear Läsker’). Such a consciously gendered structure of the jury strongly reinforces gender roles through the clear division of functions assigned to each member. These functions are also reflected in the nicknames that they have or receive during the show. Thus, Anja Lukaseder, an art and music manager, performs the function of supporter and consoler (“all of us have a bad day from time to time”). Her task is to smooth over the conflicts provoked by the harsh critiques of the “Pop Titan”, the title applied to permanent jury member Dieter Bohlen, which reflects his ‘professionalism’ and his social and cultural success. In contrast to the “Pop Titan”, Anja Lukaseder receives the title of “Mother Theresa”. Dieter Bohlen endows this self-revealing nickname to her at the moment when she goes to console a 17-year old boy who bursts into tears and collapses during a casting. As a judge, Lukaseder does not strongly oppose Bohlen’s decisions; however, she always tries to ‘translate’ them into politically correct speech and expresses her feelings towards the candidates. Her main performed quality can be described as ‘emotionalism’, a stereotypically female quality that caused so many debates within feminist circles in its time. The continuity of the image is also supported through the press, where she is described as having the following, much gendered, characteristics: Noble is the woman, helpful and good. … Lukaseder is the Goodness, the Beauty in ‘Germany seeks the Superstar’ (“DSDS”), the panoptic of the contrasts: collapses and capers, tears of joy or sorrow, compassion and indifference. (Ruzas, 2008)

These roles of “beauty and the beast”, very well represented by Lukaseder and Bohlen suggest a traditional essence assigned through the script. As seen from the previous and subsequent seasons, Lukaseder’s role does not relate to her personality per se, but rather to a traditional role of a woman in the jury. This becomes particularly apparent through an international comparison: her American colleague Paula Abdul from American Idol has very similar characteristics in her role as a judge and in her decision making process: Throughout the series’ history, Abdul had always played the part of the contestants’ advocate. Whereas Simon Cowell was billed as ‘Mr Nasty,’ and was will-

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ing to cut down the weakest contestants, Abdul often cried when her favourites didn’t win over the audience. When one of the other judges slammed a contestant, Abdul let them down with encouraging words (Huff, 2006, 130).

Therefore Lukaseder’s personality is partially subjugated to a scripted role division where she acquires a traditional gendered role of consoler, sympathiser and attentive listener. In contrast, Bär Läsker serves to reinforce Bohlen’s judgments and, when their opinions differ, the differences are never vital. In this context, Dieter Bohlen and another male judge Bär Läsker perform strong male bonding with clear support of each other’s decisions, which also conveys an image of successful teamwork.

ETHNIC BELONGING: ‘NATURALISATION’ OF MIGRATION Family as a universal heterosexual norm Gendered bodies are also ethnicised bodies: ethnicity is intentionally staged as intersecting with gender within the show. However, here an interesting staging occurs: one more norm remains a prerogative for any type of gendered ethnic narrative: the family. As we already saw in Benjamin Herd’s “macho statement”, the family becomes a hetero-normative concept around which the candidates build their gendered narratives independently of their own sexuality and aspirations. Moreover, a strong interdependency of gender and ethnicity is used as evidence of the ‘natural’ universality of family through the imagined diversity constructed by the narratives of candidates from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. One’s family, or the striving for one in the case of absence, belongs inescapably to one’s identity, paradoxically essentialising it and re-stereotyping the notion of family. Thus, the following narrative of a candidate from Sicily supports the previous one melodramatically, emphasising the role of family and the family as an imperturbable norm, totally attributing her subjectivity to family: Stella Sallato (a candidate): For us, family is simply essential, I mean, if you can’t rely upon your family, then who can you rely on? That’s why my family is everything … I think it is my strong point. (Casting 3)

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Such a narrative is present, even required, from all candidates and it becomes part of the strategy of self-commoditisation through its appeal to supposedly universal values and the attributes of a correct model of a consumer citizen. It is not surprising that family is a model for a community where the feeling of belonging has an especially intensive role. Family is also considered a universal structure that constitutes community as such, therefore the show employs intersections between heteronormative model of family and the different ethnic affiliations of its candidates in two different ways: firstly, as a way of integrating into society (for example, through supposedly universal family values), and, secondly, through the model of the family in terms of how belonging works (mutual love, appreciation, recognition).

Legal status of migration and ‘naturalisation’ of migrants through consumability Within a consumer citizenship framework, the show strongly appeals to an individual that represents Germany, thus who has to be useful for the culture where s/he lives. At the same time, the show appeals to viewers to choose their own representatives in the field of popular music, thus they have to be active decision makers. This assertion can be clearly traced through the show’s title, which suggests the concept of a traditional belonging to the nation. As Knut Hickethier explains, though Grundy Light Entertainment bought the license from the British for “Pop Idol”, they could not use the title “Idol” since it was already under copyright protection in Germany, therefore they had to change it and choose “Germany Seeks the Superstar”. It conveys the clear message that it is not a birthright that is central for ‘German’ in the Superstar, but rather ‘deservedness’ and interest of the nation in someone. This interest serves as a ground for the “nation” to let someone join it. However, such emphasis on ‘German’ highlights a clear idea of national belonging. Belonging to the nation of ‘Germany’ is generally praised as belonging to a community that gives an opportunity for its members to actively contribute to production. This appeal to the national rhetoric is no DSDS invention though; it is widely used as a strategy of appeal to cultural citizenship in casting shows. In this respect, Thomas (2002) points out the German-general difficulty in departing from ‘citizenship’ as a nation-related exclusionist phenomenon that originates from the development of nationalism as far back as the beginning of the 19th century. The show in this case

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appeals to its own version of the ‘American Dream’. In its appeal it does not, however, contradict Thomas’ conclusion (in her analysis of daily shows) that there is an attempt to continue establishing nationality as a structural principle of social organisation. Nationality is seen as ‘unifying’: “… economic interests, emotional needs and the political goals of various subgroups can seemingly be actualised through the unity of the nation” (Thomas, 2002, 174). In short, in the case of DSDS it can also mean that there is an attempt to bind the nation and to try to show one’s loyalty and desire to be a participant in the event. This version of American Dream consists of intertwined dreams of migration, financial successes, and social recognition and it does not matter what it is about, the goal is to change one’s status for the better (Meizel, 2011; Weber, 2009). Thus this appeal to citizenship as cultural can be seen as naturalisation process into the “nation” with a requirement of desiring for such naturalisation and being permanent in it. This assertion is also evident in the Contract for Participation, where the main condition is to have “first residency in Germany”, but where legal citizenship is already discarded, though a legal status of migration as a prerequisite of ‘serious intentions’ is still required. It also serves as an appeal to cultural citizenship according to which candidates, independently of their ethnic affiliation and birthplace, can effectively contribute to the culture where they live. In combination with consumerism as a social arrangement it means, first of all, adjustment of oneself to an existing set of rules of self-commoditisation, and, thus, making your ethnic belonging digestible within a present culture. Many candidates share a migration background and this is also something that needs to be turned into an effective product. It has to be simultaneously alienated from the self and internalised. It means that candidates are not to be Italian or Lebanese, but rather to successfully perform ‘Italian’ and ‘Lebanese’, appealing to familiar constructs of what is comprehended under this “ethnic” background. Here, they need to learn to perform anew what they are, but in a more consumable way. Though candidates may be of different origins, this origin does not belong to them anymore, but it becomes a product to be marketed. In this way it becomes alienated. Simultaneously, candidates are still required to appeal to its origin and to learn how to perform it in the ‘right’ way. Thus, they need to internalise it, but in a transformed form. This normalisation of ethnicity through its commoditisation in the show serves as one of the forms of naturalisation. Within this context, I under-

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stand naturalisation as “stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated nature” (Bowker and Star, 1999, 299); a loss of anthropological strangeness, a process of cultural and social naturalisation, accepting into society as their ‘own’ at least at a formal level. To ‘integrate’ representatives of different cultural and ethnic groups into a consumer society and to ‘tame’ ethnicity through consumption plays an important role in the show. The primary goal of such normalisation is to make candidates’ differences correspond to the dominant understanding of normality by turning them into a commodity. Furthermore, consumption is praised as a practice that is accessible to everyone irrespective of origin, though in a different extent. By becoming, or even aspiring to the status of a superstar, a nationalisation process takes place, where diversity is homogenised and subsumed into hegemonic cultural discourses.

CLASS BELONGING: CLASS TRANSFORMATION THROUGH MEDIA The issues of class and low social status and their media transformation also occupy a central place in DSDS and relate strongly to issues of gender and ethnicity. A working class position and low social status is frequently presented in the shows as a result of migration, loss of job, a feeling of being an outsider in society and therefore suggesting an intersection of ethnicity and gender with class. An image of middle or high class on the other hand is generated as an aspiration for belonging and its guarantee. In relation to class transformation an ‘American Dream’ is also being revived in its national form and in its mediated form. Since the show is advertised as a competition of ‘laypersons’ and ‘naturally’ gifted persons from the masses, who receive a chance to prove their talent and reach the top overnight, the prize consists of an opportunity to become ‘professional’ and gain access to a higher class position. The show creates its own discourse on the transformation of class affiliation through the media: that it is possible for everyone regardless of initial class or social status. Here, the media is the instrument that can transform one’s belonging to a certain class overnight. Here there is a need again to address the feeling of belonging to the middle class, not if they are in fact middle class. The media as an instrument makes this distinction very vague and imperceptible, however the question should be raised of whether candidates really are, in this case, middle class, and not

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just have a feeling of belonging to the middle class, for instance if they only temporary crossed the border into that other social stratum. The role of the show as a route to crossing class borders is conveyed by constantly reminding the viewers of the candidates’ previous occupations and their social status. Among the top ten candidates of season 5 we find a salesperson, a barkeeper, an unemployed draftsperson (and later winner, famous for his “no plan B” identity), a roofer, among others. These are occupations that are coded in society as working class with relatively low social recognition. However, the strategy of presenting class and social status as transformable through the media has led to a counter effect: the show claims a monopoly on granting candidates the only worthwhile acknowledgement and attention. In this case, we are not dealing with the ’positive’ or ‘negative’ aspects of recognition, but with its productive meaning. This factor is further accentuated by labelling candidates as winners or losers. Emphasis is placed on the fact that before they reach the casting their life is under scrutiny. It is the casting as a procedure that brings them recognition–a recognition mostly offered by linguistic oppression (cf. Butler, 2004, 30). Thus another candidate’s statement when asked for his motives for subjecting himself to the show’s critique seems quite predictable: Collins Owusu: The worst of all would be simply to return and to do again my old job, yeah, to fill the shelves. (Recall 3)

The powerlessness of the candidates in their previous roles is greatly emphasised in contrast to what the show can supposedly give them: visibility and recognition (‘empowerment’). Through the power to render those who remained invisible into visible thus ‘empowering’ them as subjects, the show claims the power to subject construction through life intervention strategies. No wonder that a larger number of candidates who want to participate have a migration background. They are those who still remain invisible as citizens in the society or they are still without the legal status of citizenship. The show claims to show them how to turn themselves into useful and successful citizens through contributing to the society where they now live. Such contribution however raises more questions than it answers since an integral part is turning oneself into someone consumable for the society and to learn to consume in a way consistent with the hegemonic norms. Thus, class borders

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become more flexible and new ways to cross them (i.e. through media and not through hard work) are rendered visible through the media. Through the media, the shift from one class to another is a matter of good presentation and creating visibility. The question arises though, of whether this newly acquired class persists–or whether it disappears as soon as the camera is switched off.

Transforming, or erasing class? In this respect I am confronted with the question of how this promise of class transformation affects the show. Here, it is possible to observe a paradoxical tendency. Despite the fact that narration on ‘working class’ seems powerful in the show, in reality, class has been disappearing from it. With this I do not mean disappearance in the meaning that there is no class present, but a new concept of class, which erases a traditional one, emerges. The class is transformed, in Wood and Skegg’s words, into self-responsibility. Thus, it disappears from the show in a discursive way. The candidates are encouraged to take their class affiliation not as a sign of social structure and social inequalities, but as their own fault and their own responsibility. The candidates’ precarious life situations are thus transformed into an ‘educational opportunity’ on how to change it and how to take responsibility for their situations. However, except for the fact that such positioning serves for the erasure of class inequalities, there is no real change of class. Instead, what we witness in the show is the presentation of the middle class as an ideal of a consumer citizen. Everything where accents on values dominate has to do with middle class and not with working class, which is then even more deeply shaped as something to fervently get rid of. In this regard, Heyes (2007) also talks on the erasure of class in makeover shows, where working class is associated with lack of taste, sophistication and elegance and thus has to disappear under cosmetic measures such as we observe in DSDS. A new look, new chic clothing, a luxury villa for candidates to live in, attempts to work on one’s own speech,1 i.e. efforts to pass for another class become central for candi-

1

Swearing is banned also from other reality casting shows (such as Germany’s Next Topmodel) as a sign of low socio-economic position.

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dates, but these very same efforts also constructs a new discourse on class: class as self-responsibility and self-blame.

CONCLUSION: SUCCESS OF EVERYDAY LIFE Learning to perform oneself to one’s own benefit and to subjugate one’s identity to market ideals of the physical management of the self has become a major theme within the DSDS show in terms of creating a feeling of belonging. This feeling of belonging is conveyed meticulously through the idea of a candidate as a thorough constructor of their identity on an everyday basis, through particular bodily practices. The body plays a double role. On the one hand, it contains the power of flexibility and serves a site for transformations. On the other hand, it bestows visibility on its owner. The ability to transform oneself turns into a must, where any physical ‘faults’ are no longer regarded as natural backdrops, but rather as a sign of personal neglect requiring personal responsibility. Within the framework of consumer citizenship, to consume, however, also means to contribute and to ‘work’. In this way, work comes into harmony with the idea of consumption. Moreover, work becomes a goal in itself. However DSDS shows that a different type of work is needed to succeed. This is not the traditional concept of working ‘for’ somebody or for oneself, but it is working ‘on’ oneself, on one’s consumability. The reward is not only financial; it also contains the parameter of recognition: to belong means to be recognised as a member of a community. The value of the person themselves turns into a financial matter, which requires particular transformations or “configurations” (Prisching, 2006) if one wants to belong to the society. This means that in order to be integrated into a modern Western society one needs to pass the test that proves consumability, desirability and being wanted. This test has become a pre-condition of any possible legitimised relations. One acquires value only if one is valued by other consumer citizens as a commodity they have an interest to acquire. Analysing DSDS indicates that the show is not only about being a commodity; it is about thoroughly making, producing and selling oneself as a commodity. Certainly the DSDS example is just one media example. However, we can find variations of the same principle across society if we assume that the media simultaneously construct and reflect the world (Lewis, et al., 2005).

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On the one hand, the media serve to reflect the ongoing processes of neo-liberalisation in society; on the other hand, they serve to teach us, as media consumers, how to shape ourselves according to the new and transformed conditions of ‘success’ in the changing world. Thus, for example, to obtain legal residency or naturalisation in Germany, as in many other European countries, one needs to be desirable; either in the job or in the relationship market (cf. Bauman, 2007). Failure to conform to market conditions leads to failure to be accepted into society, of possessing the rights and obligations of a citizen. In this way as Bauman voices it, the test of consumption precedes the formal law, since a “substantive entitlement to the benefits of fully fledged citizenship is a person’s consumerist competence and the ability to use it” (Bauman, 2007, 64). In this respect, we can consider DSDS, along with many other reality casting shows, as providing a ‘learning field’ for the consumerist competence of their candidates, one which make them visible as consumer citizens. Such learning means developing an ability to design one’s gender, ethnicity and class to one’s own profit. The jury expresses the goal of such learning as creating an “all-inclusive package” which means, above all, a narration of the self with no ruptures or discontinuities. The “all-inclusive package” revives old and creates new interdependencies in a very ambiguous way. In the course of the show the paradox becomes visible: on the one hand, there is an attempt to evoke a feeling of belonging to the consumerist society based on a stable construction of gender, ethnicity and class that one is assigned as a candidate. For example, if one is a woman with Sicilian roots, one is supposed to be devoted to the family, to have a particular appearance and charm, and most likely, one is supposed to be of low social status or from the working class. On the other hand, a clear comprehension of these identity parameters as manageable and useable for individual benefit intrudes. In this respect, interdependencies do not allow for an easy interpretation and two ways how interdependency works in the show can be distinguished. The first one is performative. The “all-inclusive package” demands the performance of interdependencies of different categories, such as gender, class and ethnic belonging as a general prerequisite for participation in the show. One has to create a fluent narrative where the individual is able to show that their low social status results from their ethnic background or migration story. Candidates have to stress their migration story or ethnic belonging as the disadvantage in their life story. They have to emphasise that their migration sto-

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ries are stories of suffering (for example, war, unemployment, intolerance) and pain. Migration stories can, in turn, be presented as a gendered story, told differently by female and by male candidates. Whereas for female candidates there is a requirement to embody their ethnic background and to stress it in strategies for their appearance and feminine caring for others, for male candidates the requirements are different. They need to convey their masculine ethnic identity as appealing in particular to DSDS young female consumers, who are the major group of DSDS consumers. This also leads to embedding DSDS in a hetero-normative discourse. Within this discourse, male candidates, independently of their sexuality, have to perform themselves as heterosexually appealing (for example, ‘romantic hero’, ‘macho’, ‘cool guy’). Moreover, such situations may have led to a state of drastic gender gap in DSDS: in nine seasons of the show there was only one female winner. Despite the differences, a universal narrative is created, one which is dominated by the desire to belong to the society where the candidates find themselves and by the family as a universal model of how belonging can function. The second way interdependencies are addressed in the course of the show is through interventions by the judges. Having first presented themselves as ‘helpless’ due to interdependencies of derogative categorisations they embody, candidates next need to learn how to manage their situation and to present themselves to advantage. These interdependencies they first embody and perform need to be alienated from them and reconfigured. Such alienation becomes visible within the show through different strategies the candidates use to perform their class, gender and ethnic belonging. These strategies can be expressed the way candidates narrate themselves, how they dress and use make up, which audience they address, which songs they choose to perform. These strategies, however, are the results of the jury’s interventions. These interventions serve to reformulate the interdependencies between categories of class, gender and ethnicity in order to make them into a successful product for the audience to consume. However, these interventions, expressed as ‘professional expertise’, become a product which candidates consume in their performances. The interdependencies between all these different categories turn into a strategy for how to perform one’s self to one’s benefit. One’s gender, class and ethnicity have to be subjugated to what the jury understands as coherent and consumable. In this way, a candidate with Italian roots becomes a young fashionable female Italian migrant, a Lebanese candidate becomes a guy who is a cuddly Lebanese refugee, a candidate of

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Ugandan origin becomes a Ugandan migrant father. Whereas, in the first case, the interdependencies exist in performing one’s self, in the second example it serves not only to perform one’s self, but to make this self consumable and recognisable for consumers, which leads also to stereotyping and presenting personal differences in recognisable patterns. One’s differences are thus turned into one’s benefit in everyday life, so as to succeed in a neoliberal society, a part of which DSDS presents. This benefit comes from postulates of diversity management appropriated from cultural theory. My analysis shows that current cultural theories of identity as a fluid and flexible construction find an ambiguous applicability in diversity management: being seen as unstable, an identity turns into a product that needs to be shaped to accommodate contemporary economic conditions. Such an approach corresponds well to postulates of consumer citizenship, which suggests making oneself consumable and adjusted to market demands. Thus one’s gender, ethnicity and class are perceived in their interdependency as a product that can be used in the individual pursuit of success. They turn into a competence and into a product, which one needs to learn how to handle to become successful, i.e. to attain belonging. As a result, diversity that is imagined during input leads to homogeneity–a consumer citizen–presented as the output.

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BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Consuming life. Cambridge: Polity Press 2007. — Living on borrowed time. Conversations with Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo. Cambridge: Polity Press 2010. BELLAMY, Richard. Citizenship: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008. BOSCH, Aida. Konsum und Exklusion. Bielefeld: Transcript 2010. BOWKER, Geoffrey C., and Susan L. STAR. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press 1999. BUTLER, Judith. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge 2004. CANTLE, Ted. Community cohesion: a new framework for race and diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005. CASTLE, Stephen, and Alastair DAVIDSON. Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the politics of belonging. London: Routledge 2000. CLARKE, John, Janet NEWMAN, Nick SMITH, Elizabeth VIDLER, and Louise WESTMARLAND. Creating citizen consumers: Changing publics and changing public services. London: Sage 2007. DAHLGREN, Peter. “Reconfiguring Civic culture in the new media milieu.” Media and the restyling of politics. Ed. John Corner, and Dick Pels. London: Sage 2003. 151-170. DELANTY, Gerard. Community. New York: Routledge 2010 (2003). EXTRA, Guus, Massimiliano SPOTTI, and Piet Van AVERMAET, eds. Language testing, migration and citizenship. London: Continuum International Publishing Group 2009. GESCHIERE, Peter. The perils of belonging: autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press 2009. HARPER, Tauel. Democracy in the age of new media: politics of the spectacle. New York: Peter Lang 2010. HEYES, Cressida J. Self-transformations: Foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. HICKETHIER, Knut. “‘Bild erklärt den Daniel’oder ‘Wo ist Küblböcks Brille?’ – Medienkritik zur Fernsehshow ‘Deutschland sucht den Superstar’ (2003).” Zur Kritik der Medienkritik. Wie Zeitungen das Fernsehen beobachten. Ed. Ralph Weiß. Düsseldorf; Berlin: Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein Westfalen; Vistas Verlag GmbH 2005. 337-396. HUFF, Richard M. Reality Television. Westport; London: Praeger 2006 HUMPHERY, Kim. Excess: Anti-consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity Press 2010. ILCAN, Suzan. Longing in belonging: the cultural politics of settlement. Westport: Praeger 2002. KIRSCH, Guy. “The new pluralism: regionalism, ethnicity and language in Western Europe.” Rethinking federalism: citizens, markets, and governments in a changing

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world. Ed. Karen Knop, Sylvia Ostry, Richard Simeon, and Katherine Swinton. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1995. 59-74. LEWIS, Justin, Sanna INTHORN, and Karin WAHL-JORGENSEN. Citizens or consumers? (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies). Maidenhead: Open University Press 2005. LIM, Shirley J. A feeling of belonging: Asian American women’s public culture, 19301960. New York: New York University Press 2006. LISTER, Ruth. “Citizenship and gender.” The Blackwell companion to political sociology. Ed. Kate Nash, and Allan Scott. Malden: Blackwell Publishing 2004. 323332. MEIZEL, Katherine. Idolized: Music, media, and identity in American Idol. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2011. OLSSEN, Mark, John CODD, and Anne-Marie O’NEILL. Education policy: globalization, citizenship and democracy. London: Sage 2004. OSLER, Audrey, and Hugh STARKEY. Changing citizenship: democracy and inclusion in education. Maidenhead: Open University Press 2005. OUELLETTE, Laurie. “TV viewing as good citizenship? Political rationality, enlightened democracy and PBS.” Cultural Studies, 13.1 (1999): 62-90. OUELLETTE, Laurie, and James HAY. Better living through reality TV and post-welfare citizenship. Malden: Blackwell Publishers 2008. PRISCHING, Manfred. Die zweidimensionale Gesellschaft. Ein Essay zur neokonsumistischen Geistgestaltung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2006. PROBYN, Elspeth. Outside belonging. New York: Routledge 1996. ROGERS, Ben, and Rick MUIR. The power of belonging: identity, citizenship and community cohesion. London: Institute for Public Policy Research 2007. RUZAS, Stefan. “Ich bin nicht Dieter” Focus 8. Web. 18 February 2008. SOMERS, Margaret R. Genealogies of citizenship: markets, statelessness, and the right to have rights. New York: Cambridge University Press 2008. STAUFF, Markus. Das neue Fernsehen. Machtanalyse, Gouvernementalität und digitale Medien. Münster: LIT Verlag 2005. STARKEY, Hugh. “Democratic citizenship, languages, diversity and human rights: Guide for the development of Language Education Policies in Europe. From Linguistic Diversity to Plurilingual Education. Reference Study.” Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Language Policy Division, Directorate of School, Out-ofSchool and Higher Education, DGIV 2002. THOMAS, Tanja. “Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder in Talkshows: Konstruktionen im Kontext “Doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft.” Kultur(en) im Gespräch. Ed. Helga Kotthoff. Tübingen: Narr 2002. 151-180. — “Körperpraktiken und Selbsttechnologien in einer Medienkultur: Zur gesellschaftstheoretischen Fundierung aktueller Fernsehanalyse.” Medienkultur

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und soziales Handeln. Ed. Tanja Thomas. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2008. 219-238. TRENTMANN, Frank. “Citizenship and consumption.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.2 (2007): 147-158. TURNER, Bryan S. “Outline of a general theory of cultural citizenship.” Culture and Citizenship. Ed. Nick Stevenson. London: Sage 2001. 11-32. WEBER, Brenda. Makeover TV: Selfhood, citizenship, and celebrity. Durham: Duke University Press 2009. WOOD, Helen, and Bev SKEGGS. “Spectacular morality: ‘Reality’ television, individualisation and the remaking of working class.” The media and social theory. Ed. David Hesmondhalgh, and Jason Toynbee. London: Routledge 2008. 177-193. YUVAL-DAVIS, Nira. “Identity, citizenship and contemporary, secure, gendered politics of belonging.” The ISA handbook contemporary sociology. Ed. Ann Denis, and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman. London: Sage 2009. 29-41.

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RETURNING HOME AND BEING RUNA. DYNAMICS OF IN- AND EXCLUSION IN AN OTAVALAN VILLAGE, ECUADOR Daniela Célleri

ABSTRACT In contrast to the idea that returning migrants achieve a better status position within their “point of origin” due to their economic success, this article shows more complex dynamics of ex- and inclusion of young temporary migrants in an Ecuadorian community. It asks how ethnic categorisations influence the status of young returning migrants and points to two categories that influence, alongside the evaluation of their economic success, the status of migrant traders: being KichwaOtavalo, resonating indigeneity, and being runa, defining their responsibilities to be recognised as adults by their families and community. The analysis shows that in the social status of migrant traders, ethnicity, age, gender and class necessarily interconnect.

INTRODUCTION Accelerated processes of urbanisation and migration in Latin America have led to increased socio-economical differences between urban and rural households during the past few decades (Boris, 2008, 330; Durston, 1998; CEPAL, 2008). In current-day Ecuador, temporary internal and/or international migration of young family members is an important source of income in rural households. Generally, return migration is often attributed to the fact that migrants who have a subordinated social position in the receiving society often achieve a higher status position in their societies of origin due to their relative economic success (e.g. del Pilar, 2008, 162). Nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that economic factors are not enough to explain the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of returning migrants (cf. Brettel, 2000, 100), but that many factors influence an individual’s status including age, family provenience, occupation, place of origin, religion, gender and ethnicity (Brenner, 1995, 26). Therefore, status can be reduced neither to economic position nor to any other sole factor

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(Brenner, 1995, 25).1 Instead of presupposing status as a consented social standing, I analyse it as a “claim of the occupant of a social position to a specific type of behaviour from other people and the demand by others for a specific mode of conduct” (Gabbert, 2004, 164 note 24)2. Ethnicity has been shown as important for the creation of social boundaries in Latin America. For the purpose of this article, I use the concept ethnicity to denote wegroup-constructions that refer to an assumed shared origin among its members.3 In this sense, considering how ethnic categorisations are constructed and reproduced in social interaction is important for understanding how migrants are perceived in the communities to which they return. These aspects are especially important in the case of the Otavalo Region4, where a discourse is constructed around the common origin as (a) “Otavalos”, defined by their assumed quality to be artisans and craftsmen and women; and (b) “indigenous”,5 extending the ethnic narrative to a (pre)colonial past and a relationship of dominance and exploitation. Relationships of socioeconomic dependency between migrants and community residents have constituted strong ties in the Otavalo region due to the interconnectedness of production and trade (c.f. Ordoñez, 2008, 69). This article seeks to answer the question: How does ethnicity influence the status of young migrant traders within their communities of origin? I will

1

This understanding of status as a multi-dimensional concept is not new; cf. for example the notion of “social capital” by Bourdieu, 1982. On the misleading separation of class and status cf. Anthias, 2001. 2 Gabbert’s understanding on status is based on Goodenough’s definition of status as a complex of certain rights and duties, or better to say as the struggle of the actor within its social position for both demanding rights and accepting obligations (cf. Goodenough, 1986, 2). 3 I understand ethnicity according to Gabbert as a “method of classifying people into categories, through cultural or phenotypic markers, that include individuals of both sexes and all age groups organised into several kin groups using a (socially constructed) common origin as its primary reference” (Gabbert, 2006, 90). 4 The Otavalo Region contains the Cantón of Imbabura’s in the northern Ecuadorian highlands. It is located at 2,600 meters above sea level and 104 km north of Quito (Municipio de Otavalo. Web: , 07.04.2011). 5 Otavalo has the largest proportion of self-identified indigenous population of this province, and the third highest in Ecuador. According to the Census 2011, 7.01% of the population in Ecuador categorise themselves as “indigenous”; in the province Imbabura the proportion is 25%, INEC, 2011). Although urban indigenous population did also increase during the last decade (19%), the major part still lives in rural areas (81%, ibid.).

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argue that ethnic categorisations intersect with other categorisations that construct social status–most prominently gender, class and age. Through a discussion of ethnographical fieldwork carried out in 2011 and 2012 in La Compañía, a community on the outskirts of Otavalo, mostly based on interviews and focus groups with residents and mostly young male6 migrant traders, this article sheds light on the dynamics with which young traders are confronted when they return to their rural communities.

MIGRATION AND CHANGE IN LA COMPAÑÍA7 La Compañía has 5,500 inhabitants and is one of 75 Communities8 bordering Lake San Pablo which constitute the Otavalo Canton. As in other communities around Otavalo, La Compañía residents primarily made their living by combining spinning and weaving (e.g. making ponchos) with subsistence agriculture up to the 1950s. It can also be characterised as an “independent community” in contrast to those, which used to depend directly on haciendas (cf. Guerrero, 1981; Korovkin, 2002). While neighbouring communities are major producers of knitted sweaters and other crafts for tourists, La Compañía never reached such levels of craft production. Nevertheless, some families built up an experience in the textile trade, especially since the beginning of the 20th century (Meier, 1996, 103; San Félix, 1988). At that time, traders from La Compañía began to buy products from neighbouring communities or at the markets in the city of Otavalo, reselling them 6

By focussing on male young migrant traders in this article, I do not negate the important presence of young female traders. This article cannot present a balanced discussion of men and women, because my access to returning women was too limited to implement a comparative approach; cf. also n. 19. 7 The following data was collected through a survey based on a sample of 100 households, which was conducted in order to collect information regarding occupation, educational rates and community engagement of indigenous youths in La Compañía. Furthermore, the investigation (January-April 2011 and February-July 2012) was complemented with data from the cabildo (the village council) and qualitative research methods such as interviews, focus groups and participant observation while living in the community in 2012. 8 Comunidad is the smallest administrative unit in Ecuador, with the central council (“cabildo”) being its political authority. La Compañía was due to the “Ley of Comunas” in 1937–to be applied on “Indian communities”–recognised as a Community with its own cabildo, under the jurisdiction of a parish (junta parroquial) (cf. Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2009, 134).

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mainly in Colombia, while maintaining agricultural and craft production at home (ibid.). This trend was accentuated by a growing population, the scarcity of land and the deterioration of agriculture and worsened by the Ecuadorian government’s adoption of neoliberal structural adjustment policies starting in the 1980s. Therefore, peasant producers became unable to compete with farmers in neighbouring countries because of higher production costs. This subsequently caused unemployment and migration levels to rise at an alarming rate (Martínez Valle, 2005).9 At present, many young Otavalos do not work in agriculture anymore.10 Nowadays, many youth migrate temporarily to Colombia, Chile or Mexico to get involved in textile trade, working for established migrant traders from Otavalo, or using family networks in order to trade independently. They usually “come back” to the Otavalo region to participate in the annual festivities. By doing so, they are involved in the process of reinforcing a collective self-understanding as belonging to the Kichwa11-speaking population of the Otavalo highlands, or being “Kichwa-Otavalo”. This ethnic categorisation is based on the common “indigenous” origin, and on the assumption of a cultural specificity: the successful production and trade of handicrafts (cf. Hurtado, 2009). The reassessment of the “indigenous origin” is strongly promoted by religious and state organisations. Therefore, being indigenous from Otavalo has become a matter of “pride” to many youngsters, rather than something to be ashamed of, as the statements of the interviewed youth revealed. In contrast, many of their parents and grandparents mentioned, that, in former times, they had to cut their hair–a distinctive characteristic of “indigenous Otavalos”–in order 9

The high employment rates, the sharp decline in revenues and the lack of investment in health, education, housing, and community development raised the percentage of people living under poverty lines from 34% to 71% and under extreme poverty from 12% to 31% (Acosta Espinosa, López Olivares, and Villamar Cabezas, 2006). In 1999, 77% of Ecuadorians living in rural areas were poor and 38% lived under extreme poverty (Ramírez and Ramírez, 2005, 33). Furthermore, in the year 2000 the national economy was dollarised, whereby prices increased. 10 They work mostly by low status wage-work. For young males it is commonly found in the informal construction sector, for young women in the domestic service (working for wealthy mestizo or indigenous families in the city of Otavalo or in Ibarra and Quito), and for both in the flower-growing industry. 11 I refer to Kichwa as a synonym of a Quechuan language. A standardised Kichwa language with a unified orthography has been developed (kichwa unificado). Nevertheless, most people in Imbabura keep speaking the specifically dialect of this region.

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to avoid discrimination in urban environments. Moreover, they were not allowed to speak Kichwa in church. Nowadays, young men consider wearing long hair an important means to attract women. Masses are celebrated in Kichwa and in Spanish and children employ both languages. Most young people learn Spanish at school and Kichwa from their parents.12 Moreover, a language mixture of Kichwa and Spanish–known as kichwañol–is gaining popularity among the younger generation. While the term indígena is more common among younger generations than it is among the elderly, the category “Kichwa-Otavalo” often drawn on by local leadership and academics is not used in daily life in La Compañía.13 Runa is a term which means “people” in all Kichwa dialects in the Andes, but people from La Compañía–and in former times “indian people” from the Otavalo Region (ibid., 110)–use it to refer to themselves. Indígena is used as well as an auto-denomination but when talking to “mishus” (mestizos) or “gringos” (foreigners). “Indio”, on the contrary, is referred specially by older people when they talk about discrimination they confronted from mestizos within the cities or within the haciendas. This denomination is also related to lowland/Amazonian indigenous groups.14 Although these ethnic categorisations seem to be part of daily life in La Compañía, I found some contradictions in how young migrant traders, who come back every year, are perceived by other members of the rural community. In the course of my interviews I encouraged young and old people living permanently in the community to talk about their daily lives and to tell me which problems they consider the most serious in La Compañía. Most

12 The implementation of bilingual education at rural schools and the creation of the DINEIB (Dirección Nacional de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe) in 1988, have been important achievements of indigenous movements (http://www.dineib.gob.ec, 06.05.2012). 13 As some authors have already argued, the category “Kichwa-Otavalo” is a relative new one, promoted by intellectuals and public institutions. The CODENPE (Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas) defines “Kichwa Otavalo” people as a “pueblo” of the Kichwa “nationality”, which is the mayor “Indigenous Nationality” in Ecuador (http://www.codenpe.gob.ec/). However, “Kichwa Otavalo” as category can thus not be understood as a homogenous “group” or as an “ethnic community” (Torres, 2008; Kyle, 2003; Ordoñez, 2008). “Ethnic” categorisations are historically constructed among societies, but academics can, alongside other social actors, assist in constructing or propagating them. 14 Based on this issue, Weinstock pointed out to a tendency by the “Otavalans” to look down on other “indigenous” groups in Ecuador (cf. Weinstock, 1973, 112).

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FIGURE 1: Local Leadership and Migrant traders, La Compañía, February 2011.

responses were related to concerns about the “loss of traditions” among the youth. This perception was shared within families, especially among adults. The individuals who were most often referred to by other actors as “losing their indigenous identity” were young migrant traders. In contrast, the people I will refer to as indigenised leadership was perceived by residents of La Compañía at large as role models for how a male “indigenous Otavalo” should act and look like. I will briefly outline here some characteristics of both groups15 and contextualise them within migration trajectories and the strengthening of a common belief in identidad indígena (indigenous identity) in the region.

Young migrant traders and socio-economic differences in Otavalo Socio-economic differences typically determine opportunities for Otavalos to migrate. Important for economic “success” as migrants and artisans has been the availability of seed capital, the kinds of products people choose to fabricate, as well as their orientation towards local or international markets (Meier, 1996, 128, 138). Only a few Kichwa-Otavalo families were able to improve their socio-economical conditions up to the late 1970s, carving out 15

The heterogeneity of groups in La Compañía includes collectives related to religion and gender (e.g., mujeres jóvenes católicas), music and/or style (e.g. regettoner@s, Pokemones, Emos). However, here I focus on migration as one main distinction categories–such as “viajeros” by meaning “migrants” and residents by referring to them as “non migrants”–are based on within the community. These categories, of course, are not necessarily meant as “groups”, but the actors perceive them as an important differentiation among La Compañía inhabitants.

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a global market niche for low-cost handicrafts and textile production through migration processes (cf. Kyle, 2000; Torres, 2008). Furthermore, these families usually decided to move to the city of Otavalo and expanded their craft production and commercialisation to other cities and international markets. Families who had emigrated earlier and/or built strong social networks, stayed abroad, monopolising a large part of the wholesale and distribution of crafts in Colombia and other countries, where small traders could buy their products and resell them in other places (c.f. Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2009; Sarabino, 2007; Torres, 2008). Lower class young traders from La Compañía have also experienced exploitation from wealthier families who profit from their establishment abroad and exploit the youngsters by paying low salaries for selling at market places and doing domestic work (especially young women)16. Because trader entrepreneurship elites (mostly urban or from a few rural villages) were engaged in the commoditisation of craft products, class differences have emerged much more prominently in the Otavalo region than in other communities and regions in Ecuador. In contrast to pioneer migration during the 1940s and the “crafts boom” in the 1970s17, most young traders from La Compañía whom I interviewed are part of the peak emigration subsequent to the 1999 crisis.18 Data from the cabildo revealed that 40% of the population in La Compañía are youth between 13 to 29 years of age. According to the president of the cabildo, half of all young people did migrate temporarily, but women less frequently than men. The majority are men aged between 14 and 25 who sell textiles or related products mostly in Colombia but also in Mexico and Chile. Their families are involved in trade and agriculture in different ways. Some young traders rely on a long trajectory of migration and networking, which became part of rural families’ survival strategies particularly since the 70s. Young people from La Compañía are socialised with an expectation of “travelling”.

16

On the trans-Atlantic dimension cf. Célleri and Jüssen, 2012. Ordoñez distinguished four typologies of migrant traders up to the fourties: 1. Pioneros: those who travel to Colombia in the forties or were at the first time in some country. 2. Por tradicion: those who stayed and live abroad and acquired more economic and social capital (networks) 3. Del Auge: those who emigrate in the boom era of music and crafts in Europe and the USA (1970-1990) 4. Esporádicos: those who travel after the Ecuadorian crisis up to 2000, with less more resources and stability (Ordoñez, 2008, 77; author’s translation). 18 Cf. n. 9. 17

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Over the past two decades, the conditions of textile and craft trade have become more difficult because of increasing competition among traders and the implementation of semi-industrialised techniques of production (knitting/textile machines). Therefore, some young traders have begun to buy inexpensive clothes at the Peruvian border (e.g. from maquiladoras) in order to work independently by reselling them in Colombia. In contrast to females19, only some of the male migrant-traders do not return to their home country to buy merchandise, maintain contacts, visit family, and participate in local festivals. Most young traders usually stay in contact with their relatives and friends in the community or visit them during periods of low commercial activity.

Local leadership and ethnicisation of politics in Otavalo Indigenised leadership was the second group mentioned by La Compañía’s residents; in contrast to migrant traders, they were commonly perceived as “ideal community members”, and seen as “authorities”, setting normative principles about “how an indigenous Otavalo should be.” Although some of them may have had limited travel experience, most have remained residents of La Compañía. They are primarily involved in political and/or religious activities for the community20. In most cases, they were able to attain a higher status through education and “development” projects financed by international, religious, or public institutions. These organisations support the ideal of an “indigenous identity” based on the following criteria: a common local origin (Otavalo), a shared cultural characteristic such as their lan-

19

Although there is no data about the percentage of returning or not returning young people which confirm this issue, it was more difficult for me to find returning young women than men at the time of my field research. According to other studies, it seems to be a frequent phenomena that young women return less often than men, the main argument is that women could lose their social privileges and autonomy (from social control within their family or community) gained abroad (e.g. Herrera, et al., 2004, 394). 20 State resources are channelled through parishes (juntas parroquiales)–which are the smallest legal administrative units in Ecuador–and not directly to the council. Therefore, local leaders are important to accomplish resources for the community through lobby or other political strategies, which are often not directly related to the council but to other development or religious organisations.

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guage (Kichwa), the use of “traditional dress”21, a historical continuity of “trade and artisan abilities”22, agriculture and a special relationship to the environment, and a traditional form of social organisation23 (interviews with local leadership, Radio Ilumán and members/residents of La Compañía, 2011). These ideals signifying an “indigenous identity” are a result of several phenomena. First, the revalorisation of a common origin as “indigenous Otavalos” gained strength from the crafts market’s boom in Otavalo since the end of the 1970s and their success with their “ethno-production” in the following decades (Kyle, 1999, Lalander, 2009). When wealthy merchant families were able to send their children abroad, these young Otavalos were confronted with racism and social discrimination which lead them to idealise their home “communities” as a place of safety where great collective achievement is possible (eg. Frank, 1992; Lentz, 2000; Korovkin, 1998, 148). The rise of a new educated generation has been important to explain how indigenous movements in the Ecuadorian highlands emerged and were able to articulate political demands legitimated by an “indigenous origin” supported by international organisations (ibid.). Second, over the last two decades, indigenous movements24 in Ecuador diversified their demands and repertoires with the support of local governments and development organisations (cf. Hurtado, 2009). Third, local governments put communal cabildos in touch with various development and governmental institutions,

21 Women’s “attire” is based on a long skirt (anaco), holded up by a strip belt (faja), with embroidered blouse, black shawls, and layered beaded golden necklaces (wallka). Men´s attire is based on white trousers and black ponchos. Long and braided hair is considered as an important ethnic marker for both sexes. 22 The image of the “indigenous Otavalos“ as dedicated artisans of remote and noble historical origin, with their traditional abilities of craftsmanship, without losing their “indigeneity” but instead “being proud of it“, was widespread up to the 1940s (Prieto, 2008, 165). This image spread internationally when Rosa Lema, an artisan woman from a rural community in Otavalo, accompanied the president of Ecuador on a diplomatic mission to the United States in the 1950s. This imagery was widespread by first ethnographies about “the Otavalo Indians” in the 40ties (e.g. Parsons, 1945; Buitrón and Collier, 1945) and strengthened by national development politics in order to “integrate” Indians as new economical actors or “citizens”. The image of “Indians” as “workers of the fatherland” has been traced throughout the Andes since the beginning of the independent Republics (see further for the case of Ecuador: Prieto, 2004). 23 This relates to “traditional law”, shamanism, collective work such as mingas, and ritualised festivals. 24 Cf. further Célleri and Matthes, forthcoming.

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which supported programmes specifically directed towards the “indigenous” population (Bretón, 2003, 243; Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2009, 135). Fourth, and finally, the historically-established social inequalities between “indigenous” and “mestizos” combined with an abrupt introduction of peasant and craft economies to the global market in absence of national agricultural policies led to a re-ethnisation process which has transformed the region’s social and economic landscape (cf. Ordoñez, 2008, 70). Most well-established entrepreneurs’ families moved to Otavalo City, especially up to the seventies. Nowadays, some of these families dominate local politics, formerly controlled by the leading “white-mestizo” families. Moreover, they promote the “identity” of the Kichwa-Otavalo through local government policies25, strengthened by national politics and the demands of indigenous movements (Hurtado, 2009; Prieto, 2008). This has also had consequences in rural communities such as La Compañía: young local leaders have been able to find career opportunities26 within governmental and development organisations to receive funding for their activities and community projects. Hence, their wealth and lifestyle depend on their success in sustaining the ideal of their “indigenous identity”. This is not unproblematic, as I will discuss in the following section.

MIGRANTS AND LEADERSHIP IN LA COMPAÑÍA When returning to their home community, young migrant traders are confronted with the image of an “ideal community member” advocated by local leaders. This ideal does not correspond to their lifestyles. Moreover, “migrants” and “local leadership” deviate from each other in their percep-

25 Nowadays local fests are based on ethnic ideals about “recovering traditions” from their ancestors. Kichwa language and “traditional dress” has been promoted in the schools and public institutions (e.g. as daily uniform at the school), as well as cultural practices related with their indigenous origin. 26 Typically, they work at radio stations broadcasting in Kichwa, are employees at the local government, manage credit unions, organise folk events financed by local religious organisations, are bilingual school teachers or lobbyists for development projects and infrastructure, or work with political authorities in the central cabildo.

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tions of both youngsters and seniors within the community. As an example of the divisions between both groups, a local leader who did not migrate and is heading a catholic youth organisation, mentioned: There have been conflicts within the communities because some young people migrate and when they come back, especially for the festivities we organise, they form a group in which they feel superior to those who have stayed here. Therefore, there is always rivalry because those who have stayed here form another group. In reality, they are all at the same level, although the migrants among them go on thinking that they are better than the others just because of the fact that they have migrated and come back (Interview with Inti27, 26 years old, March 2011, La Compañía; author’s translation).

Like Inti, many young residents who did not migrate share the impression that young traders think they are “better” or “superior”. In fact, many local youth have no direct contact or friendships with young migrant traders.28 To be categorised as “not real indigenous” can exclude young migrant traders from occupying a higher status position within the community. This acquisition of status is made even more complex by gender relations. Faced with doubts about their “indigeneity”, migrant traders use other strategies to accomplish an elevated status position. On the one hand, they understand “indigenous” as a primordial quality, something a person unchangingly is. Therefore, it need not be demonstrated by their clothes or language, hence within their peer group, wearing “indigenous attire” is seen as “old fashioned”. Anyone from that group would accordingly be mocked, excepting those residents who wear it for important festivities or those who are recognised as local leadership. This seems to have also consequences on young residents’ behaviours: they wear attires only in special fests and they mentioned acquiring the type of clothes and trucks that traders buy as goals for the future.29 27

Names given in this article are pseudonyms. In the survey conducted during fieldwork, 74% of the residents interviewed answered that they had “friends” within La Compañía or nearby communities only and no “travellers/migrants”. 29 These facts have been also pointed out in other regional studies about return migration (e.g. for a southern region in Ecuador Pribilsky, 2007, for examples in Africa cf. Ungruhe, 2010). 28

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On the other hand, the creation of youth “gangs” in the communities and purchasing pick-up trucks and fashionable clothes can be understood as acts of strengthening “masculinities” and gaining social recognition by other young migrant men, but also by young resident women distinguishing them from their non-migrant peers. To be categorised to a certain group can rely on the decision about whom someone chooses as a partner (Mitchell, 1974, 9). Mating patterns and the institution of marriage are subject to collectively established and often rigid rules, particularly if the reproduction of an assumed “common origin” is at stake. I asked young women and men, residents and migrants, about how they choose their partners. Both young male traders and local male leadership prefer “true” indígenas (indigenous women) as potential partners. Young women in general face a higher pressure than men to be “indigenous”, are expected to reproduce cultural boundaries and are often perceived as more ‘indigenous” than men (cf. de la Cadena, 1995). To be “a real indigenous women” can give young females–older than 15 or interested in acquiring a partner–a stronger social position, regardless of their economic possibilities, much in contrast to young men.30 While they might be taken by some men for “a better woman” than a mestiza,31 their sexuality is rigidly controlled by family members and neighbours (cf. Ruiz Balzola, 2008). Female migrant traders usually gave preferences for male migrant traders from La Compañía or nearby localities. Resident young women frequently stressed their preference for young men who wear traditional attire and have long hair, although young migrant traders would be accepted as well as potential partners, if they fit into their families’ expectations. Young resident women’s perception that “authentic indigenous Otavalos” could mostly be found in urban centres rather than in the rural indigenous communities shows that the ideal of being a “real indigenous man” is based on the new construction of “Kichwa-Otavalo” as both urban and successful entrepreneurs, and indigenised intellectuals. Consequently, being a young male with

30

Thus, some indigenous young men with fewer economic resources than the intelligenzia or travellers perceived indigenous women as in a better economical positions than the “mishas” (mestizas). 31 Women categorised as mestizas are regarded much easier to have sexual contact with (e.g. they are “perdida” or “fácil”); hence, establishing a serious and lasting relationship with them is considered undesirable or even unacceptable.

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FIGURE 2: Collage by young residents from La Compañía, Workshop March 2011.

few economic possibilities and living in a rural community does not coincide with the ideal of being the “authentic Kichwa-Otavalo” which local elites advocate. This puts enormous social and economic pressure on young women and men and causes competition among them, affecting gender relationships as well.32 Finally, the male young migrant traders may have a better chance to find a female partner than many young residents, who only carry out low paid jobs. Nevertheless, they are still perceived as “culture transgressors” (cf. fig. 2), which affects adults’ and youths’ perceptions about young migrant traders within the community, as I will discuss in the following part.

32 I was able to establish the existence of conflicts within the community regarding domestic violence and infidelity (mostly from men who migrate and leave women and children for other partners). In addition, inter-generational conflicts among young and older women were found to be especially linked to social control (from clothing, to social relationships), which is exerted on young women by their mothers, family or the community (on this see Lentz, 1986, 8-9; Ruiz Balzola, 2008, 50). This has been reinforced by young males, who legitimate their position of power over women’s sexuality and their social environment through ethnic discourse.

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“Lazy youngsters”: perceptions on land and education The majority of older residents in La Compañía regard the young migrant traders as “lazy and spendthrift.” Local leadership implies that these characteristics are “less indigenous” by remarking on young migrants’ lack of interest in the community. They contrast the categorisation vago (lazy) with an ethnic image of the Otavalans as “hard workers”. The term vago has another connotation derived from generational differences. Older people within La Compañía mentioned: “Our parents called us vagos if they saw us learning with books from school; we were instructed to go to do real work on the fields” (Interview with Francisco, 73 years old, Jan. 2011, La Compañía; author’s translation). Until the mid 1980s, most residents of La Compañía could not read or write (Kaarhus, 1989, 204). Francisco, for example, was the first in his family to learn to read due to Catholic literacy missions. In contrast, all his children (who are today parents) attended primary school but had trouble because classes were taught in Spanish. His grandchildren and in general younger generations are attending school regularly if they do not migrate or have to work. Young textile traders who have been achieving financial and social independence tend often to drop out of high school.33 Consequently, while some parents are worried that their children do not want to continue studying and encourage them to go to school and learn Spanish, many grandparents are worried about their fields or chacras because they cannot count on the help from younger generations to cultivate them. In our conversations elderly people often expressed: “they are lazy, they do not want to work on the fields anymore, now young people are only interested in earning money” (Focus Groups in La Compañía, January 2011, author’s translation).34 In other words, being “lazy and spendthrift” is a survival strategy of specific groups in a specific historical moment. The different point of view by young and old people about the importance of arable land and agriculture is evident, when older people refer to land conflicts they had to face. In the 1970s inhabitants from La Compañía–as well as people from many other “independent communities”–which

33

In my sample, just 4.3% finished high school, 45% said that they had primary education only and 31% achieved just the second grade of high school (ciclo básico). 34 Original text: “los jóvenes ya solo quieren coger plata”.

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did not benefit from the land reforms in 1964 and 1972 because they were not localised close to hacienda (cf. Guerrero, 1991; Kaarhus, 1989). Land access became even more important because of the population growth, subsistence production, and the lack of irrigation systems. Therefore, peasant associations (cooperativas) played a central role by defending land properties against latifundistas who illegally expropriated plots or exploited peasants who could not write and therefore were not able to get legal land titles.35 Land conflicts are not explicitly on young peoples’ minds, although land scarcity in La Compañía is a fact: access to land is only possible through inheritance or by buying small properties at high prices in order to build houses. Therefore, it is more lucrative to sell land to migrants, mainly for that purpose, than to cultivate it. This contradiction may explain why older generations support indigenised leaders’ claims, namely that community members were “losing their indigenous identity” if they would sell their land and give up the main activity they “learned to do”. Therefore, I interpret social concerns of older people–due to the rising social inequality in rural contexts–as important issues, which influence the status of “young trader migrants” as “not really indigenous” or “outsiders” within the community. Nevertheless, this division rather depends on how membership within the community–by meaning obligations and privileges– is defined in specifically situations, as I will discuss bellow.

Belonging, social networks and festivities Young interviewed migrants explained their most often reasons for returning to La Compañía as a desire to attend the yearly festivals Carnaval and Inti Raymi and to visit their families. Family or kinship networks have been analysed as the most important strategy for the Otavalos for their success as traders (e.g. Ordoñez, 2008; Sarabino, 2007; Torres, 2009). In La Compañía, these networks are important for finding opportunities to go abroad as merchants because it is usually the family that has access to the necessary experiences and established networks. Poorer families usually turn to wealthy intermediaries and family members, who strengthen extended family ties by

35

Interview with Rafael (76 years old), April 2011, La Compañía.

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hiring young relatives to purchase trading goods in the market (see Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2009). Especially for young women, it is important to have a “conocido” who takes them abroad. In contrast to men, women have much more trouble getting permission from their families to leave the community. Trading abroad offers them the opportunity to become socially and economically independent both during and after their work time. Young women are often “taken” abroad by their own families, husbands or acquaintances to sell commodities in markets and care for the children and the household while others family members “go to work.”36 Compadrazgo37, is often used to extend social relations beyond one’s community of origin, and padrinos are often more important in an individual’s social life than distant kin (Weinstock, 1973, 80). Mishus, wealthy migrants, and urban Otavalos are desired as compadres outside the community. In addition to one’s family of origin, there are strong social and affective ties and networks which connect people to their padrinos, who for example on weddings celebrations could get to obtain a higher recognition and provide higher financial costs than the parents of the married couple. Within the community, or from nearby communities, compadres for weedings are usually married. Single young men accept to be padrinos by bautism or confirmations, mostly if they do not already have substantial economic obligations and can afford the gasto (costs). They are especially interested in being considered responsible adults even though they are not still married. To be a compadre or affording partially the gasto of festivities, gives them the chance to get involved in extended social networks. Local single leaders accept these roles, thus their status will depend as well on how their obligations are accomplished. As Cohen (1974, xiii) argued, an ethnic leadership “must pay the price of membership by participating in the group’s symbolic activities and by measure of adherence to the groups aims”. In this 36 In general, young women have fewer chances to go abroad or to study in near cities, when older brothers take these roles in the family and work with the parents abroad. These young women must stay at home taking care of the youngest and cultivating their small chakras with their grandparents. 37 Compadrazgo is a ritual parenthood institution, in which nearly all Latin American Catholics participate. Most Ecuadorians choose compadres for ritual occasions such as baptism, confirmation, first communion, and marriage, these compadres are the “padrinos” of their children. Nevertheless, compadrazgo in rural contexts such as the communities in Otavalo, are a central principle of social identification (cf. Weinstock, 1973, 80).

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sense, local leaders have particular economic obligations (e.g. paying for feasts) and social standards to uphold. Those who prefer not to accept the role of being a compadre are mostly younger traders, who draw criticism from “indigenous leaders”, who blame them for “not wanting to stick to their culture”. Young traders may not see the role as a responsibility or/and necessity at a certain moment–as far as they are on “vacation” and want to “spend their money enjoying their time in Otavalo”–but this could change in the future. Young migrants often stress the intense competition among informal traders abroad. The information about merchandise and places to sell is highly valued, therefore, they have to be part of the family or have a close padrino to have access to it. Thus, many of them will need these social and economic ties to get married or to obtain contacts and information for their trade activities; they will maintain ties and become part of this system by being somebody else’s compadres or assuming costs in festivities, and paying the “debt” back later in their lives. Yearly festivities in the region have become very popular and more or less commercialised as “tourist attractions” since the last decades. Migrants returning home and local residents mostly attend the events organised in rural communities around the San Pablo Lake such as in La Compañía. Some young migrant traders are involved in organising–with local leadership–soccer championships, dance and music festivals. Nevertheless, young migrant groups include primarily travellers and very few residents, who are mostly relatives (primos38). Youths typically socialise primarily with members of their peer group, both within their communities and when they attend festivities outside La Compañía, where they dance together. Rivalry with youth from nearby rural villages strengthens the attachment of “travellers” to “their” community. Dancing in circles on the festival of San Juan, now called “Inti Raymi”, I heard them singing: “here were are, the young people (wuambrakuna) from La Compañía, we come (back) to dance as runas every year, those are the wuambrakuna from La Compañía …!” (San Juan Festival in Araque, Camuendo and Chilco, June 2012, author’s translation). Their belonging to La Compañía is not necessarily related to the idea of being “indigenous Otavalan” or even less to the category Kichwa-Otavalo, but

38

“Primos” literally translates as “cousins” but is used to me as a more general category for members of their own relatives or those from their compadres.

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to be Wuambrakunas and acting (dancing) as runas. As “wuambrakunas” they may not perceive all demands from local leadership or community members as “obligations”. Nevertheless, young migrant’s “belonging” to La Compañía is strongly related to “being adult” and taking responsabilities within their family networks and the community. That means, even if they are perceived within the community as “less indigenous”, that they can be actually considered as “runas” and therefore as “adults” and be equally included, by taking the chance to accomplish their obligations within their families and networks.

CONCLUSIONS: SOCIAL STATUS, ETHNICITY, CLASS AND AGE The Otavalo Region boasts an economic growth based on textile and handicraft production and historical trade migration. The interconnectedness of production and trade leads to strong ties and relationships of dependency between migrants and community residents of rural villages such as La Compañía. Furthermore, a widespread ethnic discourse by local and political leaders, explaining their “success” by reference to their cultural specificity as indigenous Otavalos, strengthens the ideal of an “indigenous identity” and its “maintenance”. In this article, I have sought to answer the question, how ethnic categorisations influence the status of young migrant traders within the community. As I have shown, the process of categorisation is intertwined with power relations and social change within the community. At first glance, in- and exclusive dynamics within La Compañía are negotiated on the contested terrain of what it means to be of “real indigenous” origin. By looking at social change and generational differences, new power structures within La Compañía are legitimised through ethnicised practices and perceptions, which are intertwined at the same time with social demands handed down from former generations. Therefore, the allegation that some young people were “losing their indigenous identity” reflects two main contradictions, which are directly related to the status position and perception of young migrants within the community. On the one hand, young migrants struggle to “belong” to their localities as well as to differentiate themselves as “migrant traders” from residents. To be “migrant traders” gives them more recognition than other young residents within the community–at least as far as choosing partners is concerned. Young migrants can gain a higher status position than residents since

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they are considered “successful Kichwa-Otavalos”. However, to be a “migrant trader” does not necessarily mean to “belong” or be considered as runa by residents. This depends on their acceptance of “duties” and norms defined by adults and local leadership. On the other hand, the local leadership reproduces “ethnic ideals” which legitimise their privileged status position and serve simultaneously to articulate social demands reflecting the distressing social inequality in the region. Moreover, categorisations such as “indigenous Otavalo” legitimise the exclusion of migrant traders, based on normative perceptions about being of “real indigenous” origin. Runa on the contrary, is a category which is build on social practices and can be inclusive, when young migrant traders accomplish their duties, as in the case of compadrazgo relationships or economical responsibilities within their social networks. Furthermore, to get a status as returning migrant by residents within the community depends on a specific correlation of ethnic, generational and socio-economic characteristics. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how perceptions and practices of ethnicity are intertwined with other social categorisations such as class, age and gender, because these interdependencies influence not only the status but also the in-exclusion of returning migrants within their localities.

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GUERRERO, Andrés. De la Economía a las mentalidades: Cambio social y conflicto agrario en el Ecuador. Quito: Abya Yala 1991. HERRERA, Gioconda, María Cristina CARRILLO ESPINOSA, and Alicia TORRES, eds. “Género, familia y migración en el Ecuador: lo viejo y lo nuevo.” Jerarquías en jaque. Estudios de género en el área andina. Ed. Norma Fuller. Lima: CLACSO 2004. 383-403. — La migración ecuatoriana: Transnacionalismo, redes e identidades. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador; Plan Migración, Comunicación y Desarrollo 2005. HURTADO, Edison. “Culturas Políticas y Etnicidad: Una lectura etnográfica de eventos políticos en Otavalo.” Maestría. Quito - Ecuador 2009. INEC. Anuario de Entradas y Salidas 2010, Censo Nacional 2010. INEC Ecuador 2010. — Censo Nacional 2010. INEC Ecuador 2011. Web. , 21.03.2012. KAARHUS, Randi. Historias en el tiempo. Historias en el espacio: Dualismo en la Cultura y Lengua Quechua/Quichua. Quito: Abya Yala/TINCUI-CONAIE 1989. KOROVKIN, Tanya. “Commodity Production and Ethnic Culture: Otavalo, Northern Ecuador.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 47 (1998): 125-54. KOROVKIN, Tanya, Vidal SÁNCHEZ, and José ISAMA. Comunidades indígenas, economía de mercado y democracia en Los Andes ecuatorianos. Quito: Centro de Investigaciones de los Movimientos Sociales del Ecuador; IFEA; Abya Yala 2002. KYLE, David. “The Otavalo trade diaspora: social capital and transnational entrepreneurship.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 22.2 (1999): 422-46. — Transnational peasants: Migrations, networks, and ethnicity in Andean Ecuador. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2000. — “La diáspora comercial de Otavalo: capital social y empresa transnacional.” La globalización desde abajo: transnacionalismo inmigrante y desarrollo: la experiencia de Estados Unidos. Ed. Alejandro Portes, Luis Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. México, D.F.: Miguel Ángel Porrúa; FLACSO México 2003. 315-51. LALANDER, Rickard .“Dilema Intercultural y lucha indígena en Otavalo, Ecuador.” (2009). Web. , 11.2011. LENTZ, Carola. “La construcción de la alteridad cultural como respuesta a la discriminación étnica. Caso de estudio en la Sierra ecuatoriana.” Etnicidades. Ed. Andrés Guerrero. Quito: Fac. Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales - FLACSO Sede Ecuador 2000. 201-33. MALDONADO, Gina. “Pasado y presente de los mindalaes y emigrantes otavalos.” Íconos, 14 (2002): 46-55. MARTÍNEZ VALLE, Luciano. “Migración internacional y mercado de trabajo rural en Ecuador.” La migración ecuatoriana: transnacionalismo, redes e identidades. Ed. Gioconda Herrera, María Cristina Carrillo Espinosa, and Alicia Torres. Quito, Ecuador: FLACSO Ecuador 2005. 147-68.

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MEIER, Peter. Artesanos campesinos:desarrollo socioeconómico y proceso de trabajo en la artesanía textil de Otavalo. Quito: Abya Yala 1996. Colección Pendoneros. MEISCH, Lynn. Andean entrepreneurs: Otavalo merchants and musicians in the global arena. Austin: University of Texas Press 2002. MITCHELL, J. Clyde. “Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behaviour: An Empirical Exploration.” Urban Ethnicity. Ed. Abner Cohen. London; New York: Tavistock 1974: 1-36. ORDOÑEZ, Charpentier Angélica. “Migración transnacional de los kichwa otavalo y la fiesta del Pawkar Raymi.” Al filo de la identidad: La migración indígena en América Latina. Ed. Alicia Torres, and Jesús Carrasco. Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador 2008. 69-89. Colección 50 años. PARSONS, Elsie Clews. Peguche: Cantón of Otavalo, Province of Imbabura, Ecuador; a study of Andean Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1945. PRIBILSKY, Jason. La chulla vida: Gender, migration, and the family in Andean Ecuador and New York City. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 2007. PRIETO, Mercedes. “Liberalismo y temor: Imaginando los sujetos indígenas en el Ecuador postcolonial, 1895-1950”. Quito: Abya Yala 2004. — “Rosa Lema y la misión cultural ecuatoriana indígena a Estados Unidos: turismo, artesanías y desarrollo.” Galo Plaza y su época. Ed. Mireya Salgado Gómez, and Carlos de La Torre. Quito: FLACSO -Ecuador; Fundación Galo Plaza Lasso 2008. 157-91. RAMÍREZ GALLEGOS, Franklin, and Jaques P. RAMÍREZ. “La estampida migratoria ecuatoriana.” Tendencias y efectos de la emigración en el Ecuador. Características de la nueva ola migratoria. Ed. Giuseppe Solfrini: ALISEI 2005. 9-108. RUIZ BALZOLA, Andrea. “Estrategias, inversiones e interacciones de las mujeres migrantes kichwa otavalo.” Al filo de la identidad: La migración indígena en América Latina. Ed. Alicia Torres, and Jesús Carrasco. Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador 2008. 47-65. SÁENZ, María del Pilar. “Las migraciones internacionales en Muquiyauyo (Peru): entre el progreso, el prestigio y las resistencias.” Al filo de la identidad: La migración indígena en América Latina. Ed. Alicia Torres, and Jesús Carrasco. Quito: FLACSO -Ecuador 2008. 147-64. SAN FÉLIX, Álvaro. Monografía de Otavalo. [Otavalo]: Instituto Otavaleño de Antropología, 1988. SARABINO MUENALA, Zoila. “El proceso de construcción de las élites indígenas en la ciudad de Otavalo.” Tesis de Maestría. Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador 2007. STARK, Luisa. “Modelos de Estratificación y Etnicidad en la Sierra Norte.” Transformaciones culturales y etnicidad en la sierra ecuatoriana. Ed. Norman E. Whitten. Quito: USFQ 1993. 243-58. TORRES, Alicia. “De Punyaro a Sabadell. La emigración de los kichwa otavalo a Cata-

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luna.” Al filo de la identidad: La migración indígena en América Latina. Ed. Alicia Torres, and Jesús Carrasco. Quito: FLACSO-Ecuador 2008. UNGRUHE, Christian. “Symbols of success: Youth, peer pressure and the role of adulthood among juvenile male return migrants in Ghana.” Childhood, 17.2 (2010): 259-71. WEINSTOCK, Steven. “The adaptation of Otavolo Indians to urban and industrial life in Quito, Ecuador.” Cornell University, 1973. PhD Tesis.

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CONCEPTUALISING CITIZENSHIP, BELONGING AND EXCLUSION IN THE PARAGUAYAN CHACO Ursula Regehr

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on how the concept of citizenship articulates with other conceptions of belonging based on ideas of race, nationality, ethnicity and religion in the Paraguayan Chaco. From an anthropological perspective it explores the categorisations of belonging in three cases: in nationalist discourse of the elite and race-oriented politics of the nationstate, in the maintenance of exclusive immigrant communities based on religious affiliation and national origin, and regarding the appropriation of the language of ethnicity from subaltern groups in the process of incorporation to the nation-state. The analysis traces the effects and implications that arise from collective self-understandings and external categorisations and focuses on inequality generating processes, particularly the exclusion and subordination of indigenous people in the Chaco. The collective representations reveal the complexity and historicity of social identities and relations in the Chaco and the crucial role of the nation-state regarding processes of identification and categorisation as well as the distribution and allocation of resources, power and social status.

INTERDEPENDENT SOCIAL CATEGORISATIONS AND PROCESSES OF INCLUSION/EXCLUSION Citizenship in historical perspective was meant to be liberating and intended inclusion: equality before the law, the right to participate in processes of collective decision-making in the political arena and to receive social benefits the state might distribute for all persons inside a national territory, independently of established hierarchies claiming divine or natural ordination (cf. Wallerstein, 2003, 652). But in Paraguay as in many other Latin-American countries nation-building was considerably shaped by the “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2000, 557). In the context of internal colonisation in the Chaco1 the

1

As geographical region the Chaco represents a lowland area comprising c. 1,000,000 km . During Spanish conquest it remained under the control of indigenous societies. At the 2

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making of so-called “citizens”–rather: subordinated subjects–occurred through military force, the expropriation of indigenous territories in the name of the nation-state and the “civilising” interventions of missionary societies. Thus citizenship in fact was exclusive and its interdependency with other social categorisations based on the ideas of race, nationality, ethnicity and religion are at the core of inequality and exclusion generating processes.2 The article explores the use of interdependent social categorisations by elite and subaltern actors expressing their self- understanding and external identifications of others in everyday practice.3 The description of particular representations of belonging is based on a constructivist, processual and contextual understanding of nation-building and community formation (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). It focuses on the various inclusions/exclusions relying on the conceptualisations of belonging and the use of interdependent social categorisations in three cases: (a) in nationalist discourse and race-oriented politics of the nation-state, (b) in the maintenance of exclusive immigrant communities based on religious affiliation and national origin, and (c) regarding the appropriation of the language of ethnicity from subaltern groups in the process of the incorporation to the nation-state. The analysis aims at tracing the implications of these representations and the inherent power of social categorisations to create and legitimate long-lasting processes of social segregation, inequality and exclusion in the Chaco.

IMAGINING A PARAGUAYAN RACE AND NATION The attempt of nation-building out of highly stratified and diverse colonial societies in Latin America was marked by tensions between sameness and difference and between equality and hierarchy (Appelbaum, Macpherson, end of the 19th century it was incorporated through military conquest to the nation-states of Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. 2 Social categorisations are considered here as schemes of collective perception and evaluation, which constitute the symbolic and discursive basis of everyday social practice through which actors conceptualise difference, define group membership, mark boundaries and ascribe differential social status (Béteille, 1994). 3 Quotations in Spanish, German and Mataco (Nivacle-Lhcliish) are translated by the author.

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and Rosemblatt, 2003; Wade, 1997). In the colonial caste society of Paraguay the positions of the elite were occupied by the “español” (born in Spain), the “criollo” (offspring of a Hispanic family born in America) and the “mestizo aculturado” (person of Spanish-Indigenous origin, who was assimilated into the dominant population group); whereas subaltern positions were assigned to “indios”4, “negros”, “mestizos” (later “campesinos”) and “mulatos” (Pastore, [1972] 2008, 87). The structure of caste society was based on the colonial institutions of encomienda5 and reducción6 and maintained during the 19th century through residential separation of the population in “pueblos de orígen español”, “pueblos de orígen indio” and “pueblos de orígen negro” (Pastore, [1972] 2008, 122). After independence (1811) racial categorisations7 continued to legitimate the claim of superiority of “españoles”, “criollos”, “europeos”, “blancos”, per4

According to Clavero (1994, 13-15) the “Leyes de Indias” defined the status of the “indio” under the Spanish Crown as “rústico” (rustic: meaning a lack of culture and literacy), as “persona miserable” (miserable person: considered those who could not take care of themselves and needed the protection by the church, the judiciary and the monarch, such as widows and orphans) and as “menor” (minor: as persons with limited capacities and reason, a status ascribed to adult indigenous individuals without evidence). 5 During Spanish Conquest the encomienda represented a system through which the colonisers partitioned the conquered population and demanded forced labour, women and dues in the form of natural products. The encomendero was responsible for the evangelisation and “civilisation” of the groups assigned to him. According to historical sources the pressure exerted by the Spanish colonisers in Asunción and surroundings through the incorporation into the encomienda and the forced resettlement in “pueblos de indios” was so high, that the local population declined rapidly (Meliá, [1986] 1988). 6 The “reducción” constituted during Spanish colonisation a system which served the purpose of forced concentration and resettlement of the indigenous population in villages, political subordination and control as well as their “civilisation” through the conversion to Christianity (Meliá, [1986] 1988). Particularly known became the model of the “reducciones jesuíticas” in Paraguay (1609-1768). 7 Sanjek ([1996] 2006, 462) defines “race” as “a framework of ranked categories dividing up the human population. It was developed by Western Europeans following their global expansion which began in the 1400s. […] Race reinforced pervasive inequality in terms of the political, economic, social, and frequently legal, conditions of everyday existence accorded to persons judged to be of different races. Race was essentialised – it came to seem real, natural and unquestionable to millions of human beings, including both victims and beneficiaries of racialised social ordering. […] Race resulted in racism, the cultural and ideological formation that shapes perception and evaluation of self and others according to racial identity, which is institutionalised in both interpersonal and larger-scale behavioural social orders.” According

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sons who considered themselves as “descendiente de un conquistador”, “cristianos” and “civilizados”. At the same time they were ascribing inferiority to the colonised population termed “salvajes”, “indios” and “negros”. At the beginning of the 20th century discourses of “mestizaje” based on the idea of “race” played a central role to imagine and conceptualise the “Paraguayan nation”.8 Nationalist local elites repudiated the theory that Latin Americans were degenerate hybrids, articulating discourses of mestizaje that instead stressed the benefits of racial mixing (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003, 7). Authors, who considered themselves criollos, e.g. Cecilio Báez (18621941),9 searched the roots of Paraguayan nationality not in a radical rupture with but in colonial history. According to Báez the system of encomienda, which had led to a “fusion of races”, was representing the cradle of Paraguayan society. In contrast to that mixed society he ascribed radical inferiority and backwardness to the pre-colonial Guaraní as well as to his contemporaries, the “indios puros”, comparing them with animals.10 Other nationalist authors, e.g. Manuel Domínguez (1869-1935),11 conceptualised processes of mestizaje as “cross-breeding” for the “improvement of the species through mixture”, in which the “inferior race” (“guaraní/ indio”) would be absorbed through the “superior and dominant race” (“español/blanco”) (1903, 9-10). Mestizaje was conceptualised explicitly as a

to Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt (2003, 12), “racial classifications have drawn as often on cultural as biological criteria. Racial difference has been defined according to notions such as civilization, honor, and education that have been manifested in dress, language, and religion as well as body type.” 8 The representations of nationalist discourses are based on historical and sociological literature as well as on documents and publications collected in the archives of the Museo Andrés Barbero and the Asociación Indigenista del Paraguay in several research periods in 2006, 2007/08 and 2010. 9 Cecilio Báez was offspring of the family of the Regidor y Propietario Sargento Mayor Don Gerónimo Báez, who resided since the 17th Century in Asunción; lawyer and publicist; co-founder of the Centro Democrático (later the liberal party); Minister of different governments; President of Paraguay ad interim 1905-06; Dean of Jurisprudence and Principal of the Universidad Nacional in Asunción (www.portalguarani.com/autores_detalles; 08.02.2011). 10 Guaraní and “Indian” are used here as a generic categories based on ascription. 11 Lawyer and publicist; member of the Parliament, Minister and elected Vice President in 1902. Later he became Director of the “Archivo Nacional” and of the “Colegio Nacional de la Capital” (www.portalguarani.com/autores_detalles; 08.02.2011).

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biological and hierarchical process of incorporation, which would result in an increasing “whitening” of the local population and imply in the long run the elimination of the “Indians”. The Paraguayan nationalist thinking was changed by the publications of Moisés Santiago Bertoni (1857-1929)12 about “The Guaraní Civilisation” and its history (1909-1927). To redeem the Guaraní from their subalternity, Bertoni used the contemporary theories of scientific racism and argued in this framework that the Guaraní represented also a “superior race”, in opposition to other “Indians”, particularly the “brute savages” in the Chaco. With his ideas Bertoni initiated the appropriation of the Guaraní and their language as a national symbol (Baratti, 2002-2003, 42-43). Henceforth the “mancebo de la tierra” or “mestizo”–as a biological synthesis from Spanish and Guaraní–would embody the ideal of a homogeneous Paraguayan nation and national belonging understood as based in a shared racial lineage. Historical and anthropological studies unmasked the romanticised and racialised nationalist myths of “mestizaje” resulting from a military alliance or relations of kinship based on reciprocity between Spaniards and Guaraní in the colonial encounter. Historical sources show that the process of “mestizaje” in Paraguay was based on oppression, forced labour as well as the violent sexual exploitation of Guaraní-women through the Spaniards in the encomienda (Meliá, [1986] 1988, 71). The “mestizo”-society, emerging since the 16th century, distinguished itself through residence in Asunción and surroundings as well as through their mode of production as peasants from the so-called “pure Indians”, descendants of the inhabitants of the Jesuit-reducciones in the upcountry and from groups still living independently in the forest, the so-called “wild Indians”. The “mixed” population did speak Guaraní, but identified itself in the colonial–as well as post-colonial–context predominantly with Hispanic origin and corresponding legal and social status. Thus the pretended homogeneity, inclusion and equality in nationalist discourses of “mestizaje” turned out to be hierarchical and exclusive. The construction of a “raza paraguaya” explicitly excluded the “indios” in the Chaco. As “salvajes” they were neither considered members of the nation nor 12

A Swiss immigrant who settled with his family in the Alto Paraná and engaged himself in scientific research, particularly interested in agriculture and ethnography (Baratti, 20022003, 41).

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citizens.13 This categorisation legitimated the national incorporation and conquest of the region in the first half of the 20th century based on the expropriation of indigenous territories in the name of the nation-state who declared the land fiscal property and sold it to private owners.14 With the law of “Colonisation and Homestead” of 1904 the government entrusted missionary societies with the “reducción de indios”: the so-called “pacification”, “sedentarisation” and “civilisation”, implying the subordination of the indigenous population.15 The territorial conflict and the Chaco-War (193235) between Bolivia and Paraguay led to the invasion by military troops, who did not only fight in the name of nation-states against one another but also against indigenous peoples defending their territories. Through the establishment of capitalist enterprises as well as the colonisation and repopulation of the region through presumably cultured and hardworking “White/European” immigrants, state control and “national progress” were introduced into the Chaco. Racialised ideas of progress and modernity (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003, 8) played up to the 1980s a crucial role to advance national development in the Chaco. Discourses of “indigenismo”16 and 13 Formally “Indians” were considered citizens in the Constitution of 1870 based on the jus soli; but through additional legal formulations, which classified them as “salvajes” (savages), the status and rights of citizens in the Chaco were limited to “pobladores” (settlers) with a capitalist enterprise or legitimate profession (Corte Suprema de Justicia 2003, 22-28). 14 The Paraguayan state did not recognise indigenous societies and their territories in the Chaco as independent political and territorial unities, with whom it would have had to deal and negotiate for agreements and treaties (Corte Suprema de Justicia, 2003, 25-26, 33-34). At the turn of the century 79 persons–mainly Argentineans, Anglo-Argentineans and British–had bought 12,800,000 hectares or more than 30% of the Paraguayan territory, transforming the country into a state of latifundia (Regehr, 1979, 89). 15 In 1888 Anglican missionaries established the station of Makthlawaiya in the Chaco Bajo; Salesians of San Juan Bosco since 1889 tried to penetrate to the north-eastern Chaco, but succeeded to found a mission only in 1920; German Oblates began their missionary efforts in the West in 1925 with the missions San José de Esteros and San Juan de Escalante; in the central Chaco Mennonites founded 1935 their missionary society Licht den Indianern; the New Tribes Mission is contacting Ayoreode-groups since the 1960s. 16 Discourses of “indigenismo” emerged in different Latin American countries at the end of the 19th Century with the growing consciousness of intellectuals regarding the presence of indigenous people in the nation-state and the tension between the imagination of homogeneous nations and a reality of heterogeneous societies (Barre, [1983] 1985). At the beginning indigenismo aspired to criticise the suffering of the indigenous populations caused by inequal-

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“desarrollismo” constituted the foundation for consolidating the “national integration” during the Stroessner-Regime.17 In this context of internal colonisation (Kleinpenning and Zoomers, 1991), the existence of “indígenas” was considered a “problem” by the government, who for its “solution” institutionalised indigenist policies.18 Promoters of official indigenismo were concerned with preparing “indígenas” for citizenship. According to Borgognon (1968, 1115) the “nativos aborígenes” “must lift up to us culturally, socially and economically to become in political regard Paraguayan citizens.” The governmental conception of citizenship continues to be associated with literacy, property ownership, and individual autonomy–with whiteness and masculinity–and an inclusion in the nation, which still requires homogenisation, assimilation and education (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003, 5). In contrast to the national constitutions from 1940 and 1967 which define citizenship without difference based on the jus soli, the official campaign of 1973, titled “Solucionemos el problema indígena” reveals the existence two categories of citizens in practice.19 Bejarano (11.02.1973, 7) represents Paraguay as deeply divided between “national society” and “indígenas”, ity, oppression and exploitation. On one hand it was based on romantic and humanitarian ideas and a philanthropic attitude of members of the elite towards the subaltern indigenous population; on the other hand it resulted in a paternalistic and protective practice. Since the 1940s indigenismo was appropriated and deployed by the nation-states for purposes of internal colonisation and national development. 17 The dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner lasted from 1954 to 1989. The regime was based on his leadership of the Colorado-party and a repressive military and police apparatus. The Stronato was known for its strategy of internal colonisation and infrastructure projects in the name of modernisation and progress as well as for corruption, violence and human rights abuses. The so-called “reforma agraria” incited people to move from the capital to marginal regions, but left intact the polarised agrarian structure of latifundios/minifundios and the social cleavage between empresarios/campesinos. It had deteriorating impacts on the living conditions of indigenous groups; in the 1970s the regime has been accused of genocide. 18 In 1958, the government founded the Departamento de Asuntos Indígenas (DAI), which was lead by military officials and affiliated to the ministry of defence. 19 The campaign “Solucionemos el problema indígena” consisted of 17 articles published in 1973 by abc, a daily newspaper in Paraguay. Author of the articles was General César Ramon Bejarano, then president of the Asociación Indigenista del Paraguay (AIP). The AIP was founded as a private and secular indigenist organisation in the 1940s. Up to today it has an important influence on public indigenist policy, particularly on the formulation and codification of indigenist law (www.aip.org.py, 09.02.2009).

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majority and minority, progressive actors and backward actors, a rational way of life (“national progress”) and a mythic way of life (“hunter-gatherers living like Adam and Eve in Paradise”). The binary representation and the ranking of groups in a hierarchical evolutionist model legitimate on one hand the superiority and dominance of national society and the state with its policy of “development and progress” and on the other the continual inferiorisation and subalternisation of indigenous peoples categorised as “backward” “ethnic groups” or “minorities”. According to Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt (2003, 8) in this context “the term ‘ethnic’ was used mainly to describe groups–especially Indians–who did not conform to a racialised national norm, generally coded as either mestizo or white.” Thus “ethnicity” and ethnic categorisations20 became a more acceptable term for what had previously been referred in elite nationalist discourse to as “race”. Nationalist discourses, which deployed constructions of race and ethnicity as tools of domination and exclusion, have declined and lost importance in the context of democratisation since the 1990s. The national constitution of 1992 defined Paraguayan society and nationhood officially as “pluri-cultural”. The bicentennial celebrations of independence of the Republic of Paraguay in 2011 continue this trend, promoting national inclusion and the revalorisation of “indigenous culture”. Anyhow, the myth of mestizaje, through which the major section of Paraguayan society conceptualises its belonging still seems to be dominant and intact, since the majority of the population speaks an indigenous language (Guaraní, Jopará), but does not consider itself to be “indigenous”.

20

“Ethnicity” is understood here according to Comaroff (1992, 66) as “a set of relations, a product of specifiable historical forces and processes rather than a primordial ‘given’”. As a mode of social classification it serves the marking of collective relations–of identities in opposition to one another. It is likely to reflect the tensions embodied in relations of inequality: “[…] the way in which it is experienced and expressed may vary among social groupings according to their positions in a prevailing structure of power relations. For dominant groupings […] it takes on the assertive stamp of a protectionist ideology; a legitimation of control over economy and society. […] For the subordinate, ethnic affiliation may originate in an attribution of collective identity to them on the part of others. […] subordinate groupings typically come to define their ‘ethnicity’ as an emblem of common predicament and interest” (Comaroff, 1992, 52-53).

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CONSTRUCTING EXCLUSIVE COMMUNITIES BASED ON FAITH AND NATIONALITY

The major immigrant group in the Chaco is constituted by German-speaking Mennonites, living in the Colonies Menno (founded in 1927), Fernheim (1932) and Neuland (1947).21 As a religious group, Mennonites are descendants of the North-European Anabaptist movement in the 16th century. They insist on a strict separation of church and state and groups living in closed communities endeavour until today the earthly realisation of the “Kingdom of God”. Because of their aspiration to form autonomous communities, their history is marked on one hand by persecutions from “worldly powers” and on the other by negotiations with kings, czars and governments of nationstates for so-called “privileges”. These have been securing them the right to freedom of faith and an independent communal life, in return for the colonisation of peripheral regions. If the legal foundation was abolished or governmental interventions occurred–for example in 18th-century Prussia or since the beginning of the 20th century in Russia–Mennonites saw migration and flight as only measure for the survival and preservation of their communities. In Paraguay the Mennonites continued the colonisation model from the Ukraine, which is secured externally through collective land ownership and a special legal status. As condition for the immigration to the Paraguayan Chaco the Mennonites claimed from the government the legal recognition of freedom of faith, the conservation of their language and an independent system of education, the internal regulation of inheritance and the exoneration from military service as well as from any oath. The government conceded these special rights in 1921 with the law 514, which still is in effect. Internally the communities are based on a division of religious and secular institutions–the “Gemeinde” (community of faith embodied in the church) and the “Kolonie” (colony, settler community embodied in a civil administration).

21 According to ASCIM (2005, 20), 32% (c. 14,000 persons) of the total local population are German-speaking Mennonites; 11% (c. 5,000 persons) are national Spanish-speaking migrants and 5% (c. 1,000 persons) are immigrants from Brazil or other countries. Paraguay has a total population of ca. 30,000 Mennonites of North-American and European origin, who live in 18 colonies as well as in Asunción.

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Belonging in these Mennonite communities is conceptualised on the basis of being a member of a “Gemeinde”.22 The admittance to a Mennonite congregation is based on the conscious decision of the individual and symbolised by adult baptism. According to the Anabaptist principle of the “Separation from the World” Mennonites consider themselves as “citizens of the Kingdom of God” and strive in their communities for the separation from worldliness, from sin as well as from contacts to people and institutions of other faith and culture.23 The aspiration to conserve “pure communities” is realised primarily by preferential marriage inside the Mennonite church (leading in Paraguay to high rates of endogamy) as well as through the membership in a particular colony, which is defined by landownership. Persons can inherit, buy or sell their land rights only inside the community, because the colony owns the land title collectively. Access to colony-membership and land rights for outsiders depends on the admittance by the public assembly, where the social, economic and cultural background of the candidate as well as his reputation inside the community is of crucial importance. Because of the strong social cohesion and the aspiration to conserve homogeneous communities, membership has only in exceptional cases been given to outsiders. Although the Mennonites in the Chaco feel entrusted of the biblical missionary order to spread the gospel and convert heathens, they maintain and insist in the segregation of churches and social communities. Mennonites in the Chaco see themselves as “Volksgemeinschaft” (as a people)24, characterised 22 The reconstruction of Mennonite conceptions of belonging is based on their own selfportrayals in published settler autobiographies and missionary accounts as well as in written documents gathered by archival research in the Mennoblatt-Archiv and the archive of the Asociación de Colonias Mennonitas en Paraguay in 2004/05. 23 Historically the Mennonite tendencies for separation have been enhanced through the colonisation of peripheral zones, processes which enforced not only the internal social cohesion of the communities but also their conscious distinction from local populations. 24 Mennonite communities emerged and developed in a historical perspective simultaneously and in analogy to, as well as under the influence of, processes of nation-building in Europe. According to Nolt (1999, 494-495) romanticised imaginations of “Deutschtum” and the conservation of a German-Mennonite identification circulated already in Prussia during the Napoleonic time. In Russia Mennonites felt the difference of their German-Prussian origin particularly vis-á-vis of governmental measures for “russification” since 1870. Against the background of revolution, civil war, deportation and forced collectivisation, the ideas of “Deutschtum” and “Volksgemeinschaft” became appealing to many Mennonites. Before and during World War II many Mennonites followed the Nazi-slogan “Heim ins Reich” and fled

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by a common national origin in Germany, defined by language,25 culture,26 and, in many cases, citizenship.27 On this basis they identify themselves beyond their particular colonies and at the same time exclude local converts to Mennonite faith from their communities. According to the Mennonite sociologist Calvin Redekop (1980, 31) segregation here is based on an “ingroup ethos which suggests that non-Germanic converts can never become full-fledged members of the Mennonite family.” Hence, it is not surprising that external identifications of communities of German-speaking Mennonites in Latin America do not perceive them primarily as religious sects but as more or less closed “foreign groups”. So in the context of colonisation and the evangelisation of the local population in the Chaco the construction of nationality, the “genuine origin, meaning the German-Mennonite lineage”, has been turned into the strongest criteria to exclude “everybody other and alien” from Mennonite communities and into a mode legitimating their differentiation and separation from “Indians, Latin Paraguayans and other foreigners” (Klassen, 1991, 338).28 A further dimension of the Mennonite self-understanding implies feelings of superiority. These are claimed on one hand by possessing the “true from Russia. In Germany the German identification was reinforced not least through the friendly accommodation and assistance to the refugees. According to Bajohr and Wildt (2009) the idea of “Volksgemeinschaft” in Germany was popular during World War I and represented already a key concept of nearly all political parties during the Weimar Republic. Later the concept was exploited particularly by the Nazis for a successful mobilisation of the masses, implying the exclusion and discrimination of people defined in racial terms as “aliens” to the German community, such as Jews, Gypsies, disabled and psychologically sick persons. 25 German language is spoken in church service, in school and in public assemblies; whereas the language spoken at home and in every day interactions is “Plautdietsch”, a northern German dialect. 26 According to Klassen (1991) “Mennonite culture has German character”. In the Chaco-colonies the socialisation of a German-Mennonite identity is accomplished mainly through the private (but officially recognised) education system. 27 Many Mennonite refugees from Russia–e.g. the immigrant group of the Neuland Colony–were naturalised in Germany in the 1940s, whereas stateless members of the Fernheim-group got the German citizenship through the German consulate in Paraguay. German citizenship is passed on to their descendants born in Paraguay today according to the rules of jus sanguinis. In contrast members of the Menno Colony possess not only Paraguayan but also Canadian citizenship. 28 My translation, as are the following quotes originally in Spanish or German.

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faith” (e.g. Kingdom of God/Worldly Kingdom; Christians/Heathens; good/evil etc.) and on the other hand enhanced and legitimated by a hierarchical conception of human evolution, in which different cultures correspond to different stages of evolution. In this imaginary “Indians” were considered as “heathens” and “primitive people”, occupying a “lower and inferior stage of culture” which embodied “on one hand miserable poverty and backwardness, on the other hand glaring forms of sin” (Klassen, 1991, 251, 265). “Paraguayans” also are considered as “aliens” because of their membership in a different (catholic) church, but as a “civilised population, with an own but originally European culture” (Klassen, 1991, 197). The ascribed moral, cultural and socio-economic inferiority to the indigenous populations legitimated since the 1960s a Mennonite “Indian settlement programme”, which established ethnically segregated settlements for small-scale farmers at the periphery of the German speaking-Mennonite colonies. Up to today, projects are aiming at the “conversion”, “acculturation” and “development“–rather forced social change–of the indigenous population. The settlement-programme and mission is not only serving charitable goals, but also securing the presence of cheap labour force at reach for the settlers. They see themselves as fulfilling a fundamental role in the life of the nation, in economic as well as in social regard, the Mennonite colonies are located in the centre of the Chaco and constitute today a pole of development which stimulates agricultural, cattle-breeding and industrial activities and is forming the basis of infrastructure which allows to extend the development to the north and the west of the Chaco (Walde, 1985).

By the Paraguayan government Mennonite immigrants of European origin in the Chaco were honoured as men who worked for the progress and affluence of the nation […], initiated a civilising labour in this region Christianising it, providing their generous hand not only to the nature, which they transformed from sterile and empty into fertile and productive, but also towards the indigenous populations (Ugarte, 1986).

These representations show the enduring importance of religious organisation in the modern nation-state, particularly the colonising and modernising power of conversion to Christianity.

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Under conditions of globalised neo-liberalism and capitalist expansion Mennonites identify themselves today rather as national agents than as “citizens of the Kingdom of God”.29 In particular in the democratisation and decentralisation process in the 1990s, in which more competences and funds were allocated to the governance of the Departamento de Boquerón30 as well as in the new division and formation of municipalidades, they succeeded in transforming their economic importance into political influence to strengthen their position as an intermediary or para-state power in the Chaco.31

IMPOSING AND APPROPRIATING THE LANGUAGE OF ETHNICITY How did the subordinated people in the Chaco participate in constructions of citizenship and nationhood and responded to processes of external racialisation and ethnic categorisation?32 For indigenous people living in the Chaco the nation-state represents an external institution. Nation-building was experienced by indigenous groups as a continual and violent process of colonisation, in which they were expelled, expropriated, disenfranchised and discriminated. Because of the persistence of inequality, the identification of indigenous communities with discourses about national belonging, the nation-state, and with the concept of citizenship is weak. 29

The Mennonite colonies in the Chaco generate c. 75% of the mainly exported national dairy and c. 10% of the meat production, as well as agricultural products like cotton, peanuts, sesame. In the Eastern region they are large scale producers of wheat and soya. Officially the Mennonite colonies in the Chaco own around 1,600,000 hectares of land; in reality they own much more because of the private land purchases in the last decade. 30 Political district of the inner and western Chaco, comprising 91,669 km2 and a population of c. 68,000 persons. 31 Since the first democratic elections in 1993 Governors in the Departamento Boquerón have been Mennonites, they have been elected as Majors of the Municipalidad Mcal. Estigarribia, as members of the National Parliament and some served in different Ministries of the government. 32 The description of conceptualisations of belonging from indigenous people is based on everyday-conversations and interviews with Nivacle women and men collected during a fieldwork period in the Chaco from January 2004 to May 2005. For a broader and comparative contextualisation I rely on empirical anthropological literature on the Chaco.

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Before permanent and dependent relations with the colonising society after the Chaco-War (1932-35) indigenous societies in the Chaco region were based on hunter-and-gatherer economies, which included also seasonal gardening and fishing. Characteristic of this way of life was an extensive territorial occupation, mobility as well as a flexible and not very hierarchical socio-political organisation (von Bremen, 1989-1990). As major social unit the local group disposed over a self-determined structure of political organisation and the control of its inhabited territory. Political independence and economic autonomy depended not only on the capacity for integration and defence of the local group, but also on the recognition of neighbouring groups; meaning it could be the object of conflicts as well as alliances. Wars and feuds with other groups increased particularly under the pressure of the advancing colonial frontier and resulted in territorial adjustments, demographic changes, migrations and group fissions and/or integrations (Susnik and Chase-Sardi, 1995). The local group typically was composed of several family groups, who respected one or more of its men based on their personal capacities as integrating and leading figures. Single families had access to all places and resources in the inhabited territory of a local group. The size of the local groups could vary seasonally or depended also on the inhabited region: e.g. during the drought-time Ayoreode-groups were composed only by five to ten families whereas in the rainy-season could gather up to 400 persons in a summer village. The Nivacle of the Pilcomayo-river-region in contrast lived in huge permanent villages, which counted up to 1,000 inhabitants (Nordenskiöld, 1912, 18). The local groups and villages were named mostly after specific characteristics according to the region, the mythology or historical experience.33 The definitive expulsion and dispossession of indigenous societies began with the military occupation of the Chaco through Paraguayan and Bolivian troops at the beginning of the 20th century. Many local groups federated to defend their territories and to resist with arms against the invasion (Cashevat 33 For example local groups of the Nivacle identified themselves as the people from “Clayôiche lhavôôj”, “Fischat”, “Tôyish”, “Joquichat”, “Vatacachi” etc. These local groups and villages formed part of the greater regional groups called “Tovoc’lhavos” (the people from the river), “Tavashai’lhavos” (the people from the floodplains), “Jotoi’lhavos” (the people from the sandy areas) and “Yita’lhavos” (the people from the forest).

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Alberto and Caôni Escobar).34 According to Marcos Moreno armed resistance was broken on one hand through the Chaco-War (1932-35) in which the violence and massacres committed by soldiers wiped out entire local groups; on the other hand through relations of trade and wage labour with estancieros, missionaries and settlers.35 The dispossession of their territories was experienced as defeat and inversion of the relations of power according to Marcos Moreno: The samto [Whites] arrived and they appropriated all our lands. It seems that they did lure us into a trap and now we can’t get out of the trap. Today we are without our lands and the samto do not allow us to enter into their fences to hunt animals or to search for food. There the Nivacle lost their power [...]. Today only the Paraguayans and the samto are powerful. Our forefathers were strong: when an enemy tried to enter into their territory, they killed him. But we were ‘tamed’ and there we lost our strength and power.36

The dispossession of the western groups led to their migration to the Argentinean Chaco (were they had been working seasonally since the 1920s in the sugarcane factories) and to the Mennonite colonies in the inner Paraguayan Chaco. North-eastern groups and southern groups were settled at Catholic and Anglican missions at the shore of the Paraguay-river. Today the names of the resettlements mostly have replaced the former names of the local groups. In the new villages and communities belonging continues to be conceptualised along the lines of the family and kinship group, which represents till today the most stable social unit. In everyday life it is maintained and defined through the networks of solidarity and reciprocity. Up to the end of the 1970s, members of indigenous communities from the Chaco had only few direct contacts with the nation-state; their alleged concerns were mostly represented by military officials, missionaries or patrones, who claimed to be their spokespersons. Since the 1980s, indigenous leaders were recognised legally by the Instituto Nacional del Indígena and represent their communities and handle negotiations with the government as

34 35 36

Interview, 27.01.2004, Cayin ô Clim. Interview, 07.03.2005, Campo Alegre. Interview, 03.02.2004, Campo Alegre.

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well as with NGO’s.37 In this context the formerly imposed language of ethnicity is being appropriated by subaltern groups to articulate the shared experience of colonisation as well as to formulate symbolic and material claims. Ethnic categories as well as the legal terms “comunidades indígenas” and “pueblos indígenas”38 serve today as a basis for self-representation, processes of organisation as well as for legitimating claims, which indigenous groups make to the Paraguayan state (e.g. claims to both autonomy and participation in the national community, special rights, the restitution of land and own education systems) as well as to international corporations and NGO’s (e.g. for development projects, material resources and emergency support). In the Chaco indigenous people identify themselves today as “Nivacle”, “Lumnana”, “Enlhet (Norte)”, “Enxet (Sur)”, “Ayoreode”, “Yshir”, “Maskoy” and “Qom”. With these self-denominations, which in their languages correspond to the conception of “true human beings”, they replaced the former ascribed ethnic labels “Chulupí”, “Manjui”, “Lengua”, “Toba”, “Moro” and “Chamacoco”. The categorisation “indígena” is used frequently for the repre-

37

Indigenist policy culminated in 1981 with the sanction of the “Ley No. 904, Estatuto de las Comunidades Indígenas”. This legislation aimed at the “social and cultural conservation of indigenous communities” and the amelioration of their living conditions, their participation in the process of national development and their access to the juridical system (article 1); it defined the “indigenous community” as a “[…] group of extended families, clan or group of clans, with own culture and a particular system of authority, who speak an autochthonous language and lives in a common habitat“ (article 2); further it conceded to the communities the legal recognition as corporate bodies, allowed communal-landownership and the gratuitous transference of land titles; it promised to them the right to have their own and officially recognised organisations and political systems and freed them from paying taxes. At the same time the legislation assigned the responsibility for any indigenous concern–such as land claims, resettlement projects and the distribution of aliments and aid–to the Instituto Nacional del Indígena (INDI), founded in 1975 as government agency, which replaced the DAI (article 32, 65). It also allowed missionary societies to establish and run stations on legally owned lands of indigenous communities (article 69). 38 The Constitution of 1992 recognises “[...] the existence of indigenous peoples, defined as groups of culture anterior to the formation and organisation of the Paraguayan state” and guarantees them the right to develop an own “ethnic identity”; further it concedes the rights to an own habitat and own forms of political, social, economic and cultural organisation, if they do not contradict basic rights (ch. V, book II, articles 62 to 67). Communal landownership is legally recognised and the State is obliged as its guarantor. Indigenous People have the right to participate in the nation-state; the right to formal education and assistance; and they are freed from civil, social or military service (Corte Suprema de Justicia, 2003, 82-83).

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sentation vis-à-vis the colonising society and the state. In everyday life in the communities it is till today of scant use, due to its use in analogy to the term “indio”. It has, therefore, negative and hierarchical connotations associated with that latter term’s origin in the colonial legal system and the incorporation within an unequal social division of labour based on the ascription of racial and cultural inferiority. For members of indigenous communities the categorisation “indígena” resonates with the pain and humiliation of their historical experience of expropriation, exploitation and discrimination. Marcos Moreno explains: The samto [Whites] and the criollos [persons of Spanish origin] did tell us ‘ustedes son indios’. Our forefathers and we did neither know from where the name they gave us came nor what it meant. First we did not feel anything, but later we understood that it is humiliating and offending, if they call us ‘indios salvajes’; it is almost synonymous with speaking of savage animals. Today this changed a little bit and they call us indígenas, indígenas nivacle or indígenas mennonitas, because we converted and live with their religion. But sometimes when I am thinking that we work like slaves, I wonder if they call us ‘indígenas’ because of that.39

Other than a few Ayoreode-groups, who still defend themselves with armed resistance, indigenous people in the Chaco today live in permanent and dependent relations with the colonising society.40 Their members form part of the poorest sectors of the Paraguayan population (Servín, 2011, 25). Wage labour has become the most important means for maintenance. In the central Chaco c. 27,000 indigenous persons live in 36 rural communities, which together make up c. 200,000 hectares (ASCIM, 2005, 20-21). As small-scale 39

Interview, 02.08.2006, Campo Alegre. The National Census defines “indígena” as a person who considers herself/himself as a member of an indigenous ethnic group (regardless of whether she/he speaks its language) or of an indigenous community, family or settlement (Dirección General de Estadística, Encuestas y Censos, 2002). This shows that since the Spanish conquest residence constitutes one of the most important criteria for social distinction and the conceptualisation of belonging in Paraguay. According to the Segundo Censo Nacional Indígena 2002 indigenous people make up 1.7% (or 89,169 persons) of the total population in Paraguay. A ‘high percentage’ of indigenous population (22-23%) show the Departamentos Presidente Hayes and Boquerón in the Chaco. According to ASCIM (2005) indigenous people make up 52% of the population of the central Chaco. 40

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farmers, cultivating on average only five hectares for subsistence and niche production, they remain dependent during the whole year on wage labour for Mennonite patrons. They are employed as daily or monthly labourers on the plantations, cattle breeding farms as well as in private business or households; the majority does not earn the legally prescribed minimum wage.41 The relatively autonomous settlements on land restituted by the State in the north-eastern Chaco, where groups of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode as well as of the Ebitoso-Yshir live, represent only one to two percent of their former territories. According to the National Census more than half of the indigenous communities in Paraguay still do not possess their own land (Servín, 2011, 25); and many land claims and conflicts, even those older than 10 or 20 years, are still without solution (Ayala Amarilla, 2009, 401).42 Indigenous experiences with citizenship in the Chaco are associated until today mainly to civil registration and the issuing of identity cards.43 As citizens indigenous people very often feel reduced to their function as potential voters, which are courted during political campaigns but forgotten after elections, according to the Nivacle leader Francisco Mora.44 Members of indigenous communities feel resignation towards national politics, as expresses Marcos Moreno: When political elections approach, we ask us who will become president or governor this time and what will they do if they win, and if they will help us with the things we need. Sometimes the representatives of political parties bring us some of food or offer us a meal. Later they win the elections and become presi41

According to the data of the Encuesta Indígena 2008 about 71% of the employees (aged more than 10 years) work in the primary sector (Servín, 2011, 25). 42 The National Constitution sanctioned in the democratisation process comprises articles about equality of treatment (article 46, 47), which prohibit any form of discrimination and defined rights of indigenous people. But at the same time the constitution formulated under neo-liberal auspices strengthens the protection of investments, capital, landed property and real estates (Wicker, 1999, 41). From this resulted an impasse regarding indigenous land claims, which could be ‘resolved’ only by means of market economy; the further consequence of this dilemma were paralyzing effects on indigenous land claims and gigantic corruption affairs at the INDI. 43 Feliza Giménez, Cayin ô Clim, fieldnotes from March 2005. Only 56% of the indigenous population have national identity documents (Dirección General de Estadística, Encuestas y Censos, 2002). For a comparative perspective about indigenous experiences with citizenship in the Argentinean Chaco see Gordillo (2006). 44 Interview, 11.05.2004, Cayin ô Clim.

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dent or governor and are very content. Then we talk again in our communities and some of our leaders go to the Colorados [the political party governing from 1954-2008] to ask if they remember what they have promised. In the last elections all the Nivacle of Campo Alegre voted for the Colorados. But they do not send anything for us and don’t fulfil anything of what they have promised. So I will state an example: The political parties are like a huge tree, full of beautiful flowers; but all the flowers drop off and the tree never bears fruits–they speak only, but finally nothing happens.45

The persistence of inequality, land conflicts and continuing discrimination as well as the search for an alternative to disappointing party politics, which are based mainly on patronage and corruption can be seen as the context of the emergence of indigenous organisations in the 1990s. These organisations are constituted by indigenous leaders who represent concerns and interests of particular “ethnic” groups46 as well as of “interethnic” associations.47 The growing acceptance and appropriation of “ethnic” discourses from subaltern groups in the Chaco echoes the former imposition of ethnic categorisations, particularly by the Paraguayan legislation, governmental politics and institutions as well as by development programmes of international organisations, which specifically support “indigenous communities/people”.

MUTUALLY CONSTITUTIVE CONCEPTUALISATIONS OF BELONGING AND PROCESSES OF EXCLUSION

The conceptualisations of belonging of different social actors in the Chaco evidence, that structures of inequality and the terms of their cultural representation are mutually constitutive (Comaroff, 1992, 60).

45

Interview, 21.01.2004, Campo Alegre. Unión de las Comunidades Indígenas de la Nación Yshir (UCINY); Unión de Nativos Ayoreo del Paraguay (UNAP), Organización Payipie Ichadie Totobiegosode (OPIT), Organización del Pueblo Nivacle (OPN). 47 Movimiento 19 de Abril (M19); Movimiento 11 de Octubre (MIO); Coordinadora de Líderes del Bajo Chaco (CLIBCH); Federación por la Autodeterminación de los Pueblos Indígenas (FAPI); Comisión de Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas del Chaco Paraguayo (CPI); Comisión Trinacional de Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas del Chaco Sudamericano (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay). 46

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At the beginning of the 20th century the Paraguayan “nation” was conceptualised in racial terms: not only persons of Spanish origin and criollos were considered belonging to it, but it also incorporated Guaraní-ancestors, the mestizo-population as well as White/European immigrants; nevertheless, it explicitly excluded the “savage Indians” of the Chaco region. This categorisation later legitimated governmental policies to transform excluded groups into “citizens” by force, i.e. through “reducción”, “mestizaje”, “blanqueamiento” and “aculturación”. Nationalist elites assumed and imposed hierarchy and inequality on the base of cultural difference. A consequence of the violent process of nation building was the creation of different categories of citizens, which limited the degree to which the proclaimed equality of all citizens was in fact realised. In the second half of the 20th century cultural heterogeneity still was seen as a threat to national unity and hence should been overcome with policies of assimilation, education and development. In this context ethnic categorisations replaced racial discourse and were integrated into the legal body of the nation-state, i.e. through the right to “develop an ethnic identity”. Correspondingly, subaltern groups strategically appropriated labels such as “indigenous communities”, “indigenous people” and “ethnic group” to articulate the historical experience of colonisation and to formulate symbolic and material claims, particularly for integration without homogenisation, their right to difference-in-equality and struggles for land and recognition. The process of national development in the Chaco subjected Mennonite immigrants to secularisation, who today represent themselves rather as economic agents with national importance than as “citizens of the Kingdom of God”. Mennonite missionaries are converting the neighbouring populations to their faith, but the immigrants continue to exclude local converts from their communities based on their conception of cultural difference and nationality, considering themselves as a “Volksgemeinschaft”. The particular conceptualisations of belonging and collective representations reveal the complexity and historicity of social identities and relations in the Chaco and the crucial role of the nation-state regarding processes of identification and categorisation as well as the distribution and allocation of resources, power and social status.

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NOLT, Steve. “A ‘Two-Kingdom’ People in a World of Multiple Identities: Religion, Ethnicity and American Mennonites.” The Mennonite Quarterly Review, LXXIII (1999): 485-502. NORDENSKIÖLD, Erland. Indianerleben, El Gran Chaco (Südamerika). Leipzig: Albert Bonnier 1912. PASTORE, Carlos. La lucha por la tierra en el Paraguay. Asunción: Intercontinental Editora [1972] 2008. QUIJANO, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, 1.3 (2000): 533-579. REDEKOP, Calvin. Strangers become Neighbors: Mennonite and Indigenous Relations in the Paraguayan Chaco. Scottdale: Herald Press 1980. REGEHR, Walter. Die lebensräumliche Situation der Indianer im paraguayischen Chaco. Humangeographisch-ethnologische Studie zu Subsistenzgrundlage und Siedlungsform akkulturierter Chacovölker. Basel: Wepf 1979. SANJEK, Roger. “Race”. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Alan Barnard, and Jonathan Spencer. London; New York: Routledge [1996] 2006. 462-465. SUSNIK, Branislava, and Miguel CHASE-SARDI. Los Indios del Paraguay. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre 1995. WADE, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press 1997. WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel. “Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45.4 (2003): 650-679. WICKER, Hans-Rudolf. “Bodenrechtskonflikte indigener Gruppen in Paraguay im Spannungsfeld lokaler, nationaler und globaler Kontexte.” Settling of Land Conflicts by Mediation – Schlichtung von Landkonflikten. Ed. Erdmute Alber, and Julia Eckert. Berlin: Institut für Ethnologie Berlin; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) 1999. 31-43.

Primary sources ASOCIACIÓN DE SERVICIOS DE COOPERACIÓN INDÍGENA-MENNONITA (ASCIM). Indígenas del Chaco Central Paraguayo. Etnohistoria e Identidad Contemporánea. Filadelfia 2005. BÁEZ, Cecilio. Resumen de la Historia del Paraguay. Desde la Época de la Conquista Hasta el Año 1880. Asunción: Talleres de H. Kraus 1910. BEJARANO, César Ramón. “Solucionemos el Problema Indígena. XIII: El indígena en la sociedad nacional”. abc, 11.02.1973: 7-8. BORGOGNON, Alfonso. “Panorama indígena paraguayo.” América Indígena, XXVIII (1968): 1101-1117.

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CARDOZO, Efraím. El Paraguay Colonial. Las raíces de la Nacionalidad. Buenos Aires; Asunción: Ediciones Nizza 1959. DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE ESTADÍSTICAS, ENCUESTAS Y CENSOS (deegc). Segundo Censo Nacional Indígena de Población y Viviendas. Asunción 2002. DOMÍNGUEZ, Manuel. Causas del Heroismo Paraguayo. Asunción: Talleres Nacionales de H. Kraus 1903. KLASSEN, Peter P. Die Mennoniten in Paraguay. Begegnung mit Indianern und Paraguayern. Vol. 2. Bolanden-Weierhof: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein e.V. 1991. SERVÍN, Jorge. “La exclusión de los pueblos indígenas en el Paraguay.” Pueblos Indígenas en el Paraguay. ‘Éramos nosotros, los que vivieron por acá.’ Exposición presentada por la Embajada de España en Paraguay y el Centro Cultural de España Juan de Salazar. Curador Carlos Colombino con la especial colaboración de Bartomeu Meliá, s.j. Asunción 2011. UGARTE CENTURIÓN, Delfín. Speech of the Minister of Industry and Trade, 28.11.1986. Source document from the archive of the Asociación de Colonias Mennonitas en Paraguay. WALDE, Kornelius. Letter to the Minister of Defence, Gral. Don G. Gaspar Martínez, 17.05.1985. Source document from the archive of the Asociación de Colonias Mennonitas en Paraguay.

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NATIONAL BELONGING IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. THE LEGAL POSITION AS AN INTERDEPENDENT SOCIAL CATEGORISATION

Tobias Schwarz

ABSTRACT Based on an ongoing empirical study of legal exclusion in the Dominican Republic, this article discusses the institutionalisation of difference by governmental institutions. In the Dominican Republic, the symbolic opposition to the neighbour Haiti has been formalised through legislation in the course of the 20th century aimed at excluding Haitian immigrants. Today, the legal exclusion of Dominicans of Haitian descent reformulates the way identity and difference are expressed. Analysing the differentiated legal position–i.e. in my case the position of a legal resident vs. an irregular immigrant–I will show in this article that the structural power relations race, class, and gender can most convincingly be understood as heuristic devices that have to be used together, not separated.

INTRODUCTION: DEFINING NATIONAL BELONGING In January 2010, the Dominican Republic adopted a revised constitution, which amends the nationality clause. Since 1929, and before 2010, this definition of national belonging (in Article 8 No. 2 of the constitution of 1929), defined as “Dominicans” “every person born on the territory of the Republic with the exception of […] those in transit.”1 This means that birthright citizenship was granted to everybody born on Dominican soil. Only transients (and diplomats, omitted here because this group will not be of importance in the course of the 20th century) were excluded from this definition of nationals. This ius soli (“right of the soil”) was a constitutional principle not only in the Dominican Republic, but also in almost all of the independent countries in the Americas since the mid 19th century (with Haiti being the prominent 1

“Son dominicanos”: “Todas las personas que nacieren en el territorio de la República, con excepción de los […] que estén de tránsito en el.” Article 8 No. 2 of the constitution of 1929.

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exception). The exemption just mentioned is: if the parents are only passing through the country, the child isn’t automatically granted Dominican nationality at birth. In 2010, this clause was amended by the words “or reside in Dominican territory illegally”2; meaning that now birthright nationality is only derived from a parent’s legal residency inside the territory. This was just one step–the last step so far–in a series of government strategies that started in the 1990s to restrict the granting of national membership. Why this happened, and what the consequences are, I will discuss in detail in the course of this article. In doing so, I also want to show the symbolic power of law, perceived here as an institutionalised order of knowledge. To my understanding, formal legal rules, the material artefacts of legal doctrines, can show us, which perceptions of collective identity are in fact prevailing and are being powerful. Besides the main empirical focus of this chapter–state controlled AntiHaitianism in the Dominican Republic–, I’m also concerned with a theoretic question: How can the national legal position of a person be understood as an interdependent categorisation? To answer this I will first explain how I use the phrase national legal position. After the subsequent empiric case study I turn to discuss interdependencies and argue that nationality has to be understood not only as a technology of “race” but an interdependent categorisation. That is because the structural power relations race, class and gender can most convincingly be understood as heuristic devices that have to be applied in research together, not separated.

NATIONAL LEGAL POSITION “Legal position” in general denotes the relationship between individuals and the legal system. The last being defined by the political entity, which is today in most cases the nation state,3 it provides the individuals with an ascribed, 2

Today’s Article 18 No. 3 of the constitution of 2010 reads: “Son dominicanas y dominicanos: […] Las personas nacidas en territorio nacional, con excepción […] de extranjeros que se hallen en tránsito o residan ilegalmente en territorio dominicano.” 3 There are of course bigger legal systems like international trading regulations, the human rights system and in part an international criminal justice system. But as the term “international” clearly shows, the nation state plays a significant role in implementing even these international legal regimes.

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discretionary set of formal capacities. In other words: the individual’s legal position is shaped by his/her position as member of a nation state and formalised as specific–and exclusively national–citizenship rights. The legal position I’m concerned with here derives from the difference between those individuals who have, due to the concept of the equal citizen, equal and unaltered capacity to be a subject of legal rights and duties, and those who don’t, due to their formal situation as non-nationals or “foreigners”.4 It is exactly this antagonism to the non-citizen that shows the nationals main quality: being entitled to full citizenship rights.5 The foreigner, in contrast, is by definition entitled to a lesser position only, to a diminished set of rights. The legal alien is indeed a legal subject and can close binding contracts,6 but the lack of a position equal to the national often means to have no right to work, no right to higher education, no entitlement to welfare, and, most crucial to the relationship between the individual and the state, no political rights.7 So when I’m talking about “national legal position” I’m concerned with the formal definition of belonging to a political entity, the nation state, by means of a specific category of membership, the legal position “nationality”.8 4

I.e. I’m not concerned with minors or other individuals who don’t have legal capacity. This binary in-/exclusion holds true in the post-colonial context. During colonial regimes that grated “equal” citizenship to all male colonisers but excluded the colonised, the distinction between those who fully participate and those who are more or less excluded cut across the imagined national collective; as a prominent example cf. Gèze, 2006 for the French Code d’Indigénat. Another particular constellation is the legal exclusion of Jewish Germans from full citizenship: from 1935 on Jews were entitled to a devalued German Staatsangehörigkeit (lit.: nationality) only, while “Arian” Germans (“deutschen oder artverwandten Blutes”) were on top of that defined as Reichsbürger (“citizen of the Reich”) and thus entitled to citizenship rights; cf. Gosewinkel, 2001, 369. 6 Hence it holds basic “civil rights” according to the distinction between civil, political and social rights in the tradition of T. H. Marshall (1950). 7 The exact extend of discrimination differs among cases. In most, but not all nation states, foreigners have no voting rights at all; if resident aliens are in fact entitled to the franchise, their legal position is at least slightly lower than that of nationals (e.g. they might not have a vote in national or presidential elections, cf. Hayduk, 2006). In 2003, out of a sample of 25 democratic states only two granted non-discriminatory voting rights to non-nationals resident inside the country, New Zealand and Uruguay; cf. Earnest, 2003, 33. 8 The term “nationality” (as in nacionalidad/nationalité) is employed here instead of the commonly used “citizenship” to not connote the complex “collection of rights“ resting upon 5

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And since the world is divided up into nation states, allocating most individuals to at least one nation state, the fact that all individuals have the legal position “national” within their country of residence is sometimes taken for granted and thus forgotten. Since the legal procedures produce their own legal subjects, even if “the national” is constituted only within the defining powers of the national world system, it appears as if it was pre-existent. To “have rights” then appears to be logical, and that certain groups don’t have (the same) rights seem to be legitimate. But if humans cross national borders, this necessarily creates a situation where individuals of distinct legal positions live next to each other: the national and the foreigner.9 Nationality is commonly understood as a purely juridical categorisation, bare of any social connotation. But there are no politically neutral definitions of national membership. Firstly, decisions to include certain groups in or exclude them from national belonging are always results of extralegal power relations, even if they seem completely formal. A nation states’ definition of legal belonging in the guise of nationality is shaped by hegemonic believes of collective identity, by the varying histories of statehood, by policies of colonialisation, settlement, and migration, and by types of governance–just to mention the obvious. There is nothing less neutral. Secondly, these decisions of inclusion or exclusion have far-reaching consequences. Due to the power formal norms have in modern society, a person’s position defined by law can be significant for its position in society as a whole. This holds especially true for the exclusion of non-nationals, because on top of the formal exclusion from various sub-systems mentioned above it can have a painful consequence: deportation from the territory. One concrete shape this distinction between the national and the foreigner takes–and the specific power relations relevant for and by this distinction–is the legal position of immigrated workers. Now I will return to my case study, the Dominican immigration regime.

formal membership to the nation (Isin and Turner, 2008, 7) but de facto partly accessible to non-nationals too. 9 There are of course constellations where this distinction between those who legally belong and those who are formally considered strangers becomes more visible and more openly violent: in wartimes, cases of occupation or secession of territory and in zones of conflict between nation states–all of them constellations sadly common to the 20th century, the high times of the national principle; cf. Gellner, 1983; Sassen, 2006; Wimmer, 2002.

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FORMALISING NATIONAL BELONGING The constitutional amendment of 2010 mentioned in the introduction to this chapter targeted descendants of Haitian workers who migrated into the Dominican Republic since the early 20th century. Thus, the close but difficult relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic represents the historic context of today’s debates.10 Haitian-Dominican relations are massively shaped by the colonial situation, from the introduction of slavery in the 15th century to wars between the two Republics following and reflecting independence in the 19th. The western neighbour on the island Hispaniola, Haiti, in 1804 reached its independence from France by a revolution of slaves against their masters. Haitian military from 1822 to 1844 occupied the eastern part of the island, thus the Dominican Republic fought for its independence not against Spain, but against a republic of former slaves. During this mid 19th-century war of independence and the following political tensions and military confrontations between the two countries, explicit anti-Haitian propaganda by Dominican political elites reached its first peak. By the second half of the 19th century using the image of the Dominican society as “non-black” in contrast to the population of Haiti was widespread. Even today, being “non-black” is part of the Dominican self-perception, and being “black” is reserved for Haitians (Sagás, 2000, 37). Nevertheless, the Dominican believe of cultural superiority in relation to the neighbour Haiti is as much a matter of a long durée as a product of 20th century state propaganda. During the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, historic differences established by French and Spanish colonial rule were transformed into assumed cultural differences between the two countries. Trujillo’s 30 years of propaganda solidified the idea of the two countries as two separate “peoples”, and the maintained difference was finally racialised, “so as to pretend that Haitians and Dominicans not only belong to different nations, but also to completely different races” (Sagás, 2000, 51). As I’m now turning to the explicit rules gov10 There are numerous publications on the history of the island Hispaniola (samples are Hoetink, 1986; Matibag, 2003; Moya Pons, 2010) and my study relies on extensive historical and sociological research on Dominican Anti-Haitianism (c f. among others Baud, 1996; Howard, 2001; Sagás, 2000; Torres-Saillant, 1998; Paulino, 2006) so I outline only the historical findings central to my argument.

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erning immigration into the Dominican Republic in the 20th century, I will show the close correlation between the believe of “racial” superiority fomented by the Dominican state and the legal discrimination of immigrant workers.

Brief history of immigration control in the Dominican Republic Haitian immigration was and is of great economic importance for the Dominican Republic. Historically, the Dominican Republic has been a country of destination. From the second half of the 19th century on, cane cutters (braceros) were recruited to work on Dominican sugar plantations, firstly from the Anglophone Caribbean, later replaced by Haitians. Today’s migration regime started to take shape during U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic and the expansion of the sugar industry in the wake of the First World War. From 1916 to 1924, the Dominican Republic was occupied by the United States, and the concomitant occupation of Haiti (1914-1934) facilitated cross border exchange of labour under U.S. dominance. Soon it showed that Haitian workers were both easier obtainable and cheaper than migrants from other islands. The legal exclusion of “perturbing” individuals was already affirmed and consolidated as a categorisation of desired White and undesired Black11 immigrants by the migration law of 1912.12 When economic growth demanded an increasing influx of cheep labour, this legal regime of discrimination was used by the U.S. military rule, declaring the immigration of “braceros of whatever race but the Caucasian” unlawful unless specifically authorised by the government.13 The Trujillo government perpetuated this exclusion of Black foreign workers from the liberal labour market. After 1930, three slightly altered immigration laws were passed, first introducing vastly differing entrance fees for “African naturals” as opposed to those “not of the black race” in 1932, and finally installing the distinction

11

Identifying individuals as members of certain racialised groups does not mean to assume “anything about the details of these individuals’ ancestry; only about how they were understood in their own social world”, as Gross states correctly (Gross, 2011, 560). To stress the fact that “Black” and “White” are social ascriptions, majuscules are used throughout this chapter. 12 Ley de migración, 7.5.1912 (Gaceta Oficial 2295). 13 Orden ejecutiva No. 372, 16.12.1919 (G.O. No. 3075).

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between “inmigrantes” and “no inmigrantes” in 1939.14 The three laws didn’t prohibit Black immigration altogether, but made it very unlikely due to horrendous fees of various hundred U.S. dollars, a poor worker could never procure, while those contracted by sugar companies all paid only the same small amount, regardless of their racial category, allowing Blacks to enter only as unskilled farmhands without legal residency.15 From 1939 on, the foreign braceros fell into the category of ‘non immigrants’ (as all temporary workers did), thus no mentioning of skin colour was necessary to exclude them from permanent residency. While declaring the Black element in immigration flows undesired, and in doing so legitimising discriminatory treatment of Black workers, the labour shortages were still high. As government interest in sugar plantations grew in the 1930s, a series of bilateral agreements (convenios) were signed between the Haitian and the Dominican governments throughout the Trujillo era, allowing the entry of Haitians only for specific periods on specific areas (mainly the harvest of sugar cane).16 The Haitian workers were contracted by big sugar companies (and later directly by the state) and brought onto the plantations. They were only allowed to stay for the duration of the labour they were contracted for and they were obliged to stay on the plantation they had to work on. Because they might only work on the assigned plantations during the assigned period, they were deprived of any legal right to remain inside the country. As soon as the contractor didn’t need the farmhands anymore, or if they decided to change their workplace or even to just leave the plantation, they could legally be picked up by the police and deported–and thus were excluded from society at large. This legal regime, restrictive against the worker, yet flexible to the needs of the sugar companies, was institutionalised for decades to come in contracts between the employer and the labourer (ruled in the convenios mentioned above) and in the 1939 immigration law, defining the “temporary workers” as non-immi-

14

“Naturales del continente Africano” as opposed to those “que no sean de raza negra” Ley No. 279, 29.1.1932 (G.O. 4435); Ley No. 739, 14.8.1934 (G.O. 4710); Ley No. 95, 21.3.1939 (G.O. 5299). 15 The logic to introduce racialised types of immigrants is reconstructed by Capdevila, 2004. 16 Gradually, settlements of cane cutters (bateyes) were established on and around the sugar plantations (Moya Pons, 1986).

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grants.17 The braceros were therefore physically present within the Dominican Republic, but symbolically absent. The death of Trujillo and the transition to civil government didn’t end this system of tight governmental control of migrant workers. Private owned sugar plantations continued to profit from states authority in fostering immigration. Trujillo’s private plantations on the other hand were nationalised 1966 and from then on managed directly by the state through the Consejo Estatal del Azúcar (CEA). Therefore, the state centred system of recruitment and repatriation of migrant workers was, with slight changes, in place until the mid 1980s (when the military regime in Haiti collapsed, cf. Ferguson, 2003, 11). This legal exclusion (from a formal status of residency) impeded any durable recognition of basic migrant labour rights, thus seriously devaluated their power to negotiate terms and payments of their labour and put the migrant labour force in a precarious situation. It served to both diminish the employers’ costs and to increase their leverage over the workers organising potential (cf. NCHR, 1996, 36; Ferguson, 2003, 14). As a side effect of this labour importation regime, a relatively homogenous segment of the rural population–young, dark skinned, male, often illiterate workers who’s mother tongue was Creole–emerged, that took over the less liked and worst paid jobs not enough Dominicans were willing to do. Working on the sugar plantations, historically associated with slaves, became additionally associated with migrants from Haiti, the republic of former slaves. Dominican governments and plantation owners alike encouraged the assumption “that Haitians–and not Dominicans–were suited to the work” (Ferguson, 2003, 10). As the sugar harvest, an arduous and degrading activity, was seen as an appropriate work for the low paid, uneducated Haitian migrant, this slave-like image served as a national Other to the Dominicans seeing themselves not suited to this type of work and thus as superior (Baud, 1996, 131). Once again, a national “us” took shape against a contrasting character of underdevelopment and illiteracy, associated in popular believe with Blackness. In the last two decades of the 20th century, however, the direct state control of labour import has been transformed in an official policy of collective 17 “Clases de no inmigrantes: […] 4. Jornaleros temporeros y sus familias.” Ley de migración (1939), art. 3. These restrictions were combined with and of elevated efficiency due to the “Dominicanización del trabajo” principle, cf. Cuevas P., 1999, 128 and Capdevila, 2004, 448-451.

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deportations. Since the early 1990s the Dominican government deported large amounts of irregular migrant workers (as they never possessed the legal position of “foreign residents”) to Haiti. Today, the police and/or the military carry out both big- and small-scale deportations.18 After Trujillo’s death Anti-Haitianism ceased to be the official state position, but a certain tendency continued, and in Dominican society implicit Anti-Haitianism persists ever since. But nobody can say with certainty to witch extend this anti-Haitian racism is accepted or shared by the Dominican population at large and relevant in lay peoples everyday interactions.19 On the official state level however, dominant discourse towards Haitian immigration changed. Since massive importation of a cheep rural workforce was no longer the prime necessity, and the 1939 immigration law obviously was not suited anymore to the regulation of immigration, government officials in the 1990s started discussing a groundbreaking change of the legislative set-up of immigration control (Lozano, 2008, 29-38). Contrary to unfounded assertions about a huge increase in net migration, it mainly was the visibility of Haitians on the Dominican side of the island that changed considerably. Since the beginning of massive immigration in the second decade of the 20th century, and before the 1980s/1990s economic changes, immigration of Haitians was rural, meaning to the bateyes. The Haitian population thus was contained at the plantations, and police raids in the interior could effectively maintain this containment. Around the turn of the century the Haitian population probably didn’t grow significantly bigger, but more Haitians than ever in Dominican history were now living in urban areas.20 18

President Balaguer decreed “repatriation” resulted in an estimated 35,000 persons deported in 1991 (Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, 1999, 332). Other massive collective expulsions are reported 1996 and 1997 (Human Rights Watch, 2002, 15-17; International Human Rights Law Clinic, 2002, 5-7). In the decade since 2000, no mass deportations are reported anymore, but nonetheless the amount of people deported to Haiti in less public day-to-day expulsions of individuals and groups are considerable, ranging from 13,000 to over 30,000 per year from 1998 to 2008 (Human Rights Watch, 2002, 17; Groupe d’Appui aux Refugies et Rapatries (GARR), 2009, 28). 19 Baud for instance stresses not to negate the “nuances, intermediate categories, antiracist ideas, and social differences” that are present in day-to-day relations in Dominican society (Baud, 2002, 320). 20 There are no trustworthy figures of Haitian immigration to the Dominican Republic as the public register is insufficient (cf. Ferguson, 2003, 10; del Castillo, 2005, 19). Estimates by various NGOs point to the presence of around half a million of Dominico-Haitianos in

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Today they are visible inside the cities or the tourism resorts, working on building sites and as cheap care workers or security personnel (Ferguson, 2003, 15; Báez Evertsz and Lozano, 2005). Thus, governmental policies of exclusion changed. In this new regime, the main focus is not the exclusion of the individual Haitian migrant from a legal position that might one day grant a residency (thus using segregation and the exclusionary character of the foreigners law as the rampart of the national), but the exclusion of the Haitian population as a whole from the direct access to a position of formal belonging (thus using the idea of nationality (law) as the limiting principle). Since 2004 this is visible through changes in the migration law I’m moving on to now.

Explicit exclusion of newborns from documentation To understand the consequences of this change of perception described so far, we have to keep in mind that nationality in the Dominican Republic is derived from an individual’s birth on the soil. This ius soli was first ruled in the Dominican constitution of 1858 and maintained unrestricted until 1929, when the children born to “those who are in transit in the country” (explained above) were excluded. When this qualification was introduced at the beginning of the 20th century, many nation states in Latin America were making sure that newborns are not ‘automatically’ nationals if their parents are just passing through the country with a destination abroad.21 Therefore, in 1929, “de tránsito” was not a contested wording, it’s meaning seemingly specific enough, excluding children born to transients, ship crews and the like. The first application of this qualification has been made explicit in the 1939 implementing regulation to the immigration law. There, it says under the headline “Transeuntes”: 2002, 300,000 of which are themselves immigrants, the remaining 200,000 their children born inside the Dominican Republic; cf. Báez Evertsz and Lozano, 2008, 187; Tejeda, 2008, 303-304; Lozano, 2008, 155-167. Commenting on the political implications of the amount of immigrated Haitians, cf. Báez Evertsz and Lozano 2005; Oficina de Desarrollo Humano del PNUD, 2010, 82. 21 The U.S. 14th constitutional amendment that rules ius soli is the most famous exception, granting unconditional citizen status even to children born to tourists while inside the U.S. In the U.S. norm that rules ius soli, there is another highly contested phrase: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof ”, aimed at the exclusion of Native Americans; cf. Jacobson, 2006.

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Foreign nationals trying to enter the Republic with the main purpose of continuing through the country with an outside destination are granted privileges of transients. [...] A 10-day period will ordinarily be considered sufficient to be able to pass through the Republic.22

As this regulation shows, for “transients” a maximum stay of about ten days was understood to be appropriate. Hence the children born to Haitian braceros working in the Dominican Republic were born if not to permanent residents, surely not to parents “in transit”–even if their legal position was, as I have shown above, never that of legal residents. In the 1990s, though, it became known that not everybody shared this seemingly evident understanding of “de tránsito” in the nationality clause of the Dominican constitution. Through the transition of Dominican society from a dictatorship to a liberal political system that at least theoretically recognises basic rights of its citizens, the question who would be such a citizen gradually became more pressing. A certain reading that might have existed unexpressed for some time became dominant: that the children of ‘temporary’ migrant workers do not–and more importantly, did not in the past–obtain Dominican nationality at birth. Accordingly, the Dominican civil registry office started refusing to register newborn children of Haitian parentage as Dominican nationals (NCHR, 1996, 17-19; Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas (MUDHA), 2000; Human Rights Watch, 2002, 22-26; Wooding and Moseley-Williams, 2004, 83). More and more offices of the civil register started to ask the parents for proof of their identity like Dominican residency cards, which the braceros didn’t have (Open Society Foundations, 2010, 5), or outright refused to register newborns if their parents “have Haitian sounding names, or they are black and speak accented Spanish” (Wooding, 2008, 369). At the same time, legislative attempts were made to revise the immigration law of 1939. The changes finally took shape in 2004, when senate and parliament accepted a modified immigration law. This new version explicitly defines all types of non-residents, including the temporary workers, as “de

22 “A los extranjeros que traten de entrar a la República con el Propósito principal de proseguir al través del país con destino al exterior, se les concederán privilegios de transeúntes. […] Un período de 10 días se considerará ordinariamente suficiente para poder pasar al través de la Republica.” Reglamento de Inmigración, 12.5.1939 (G.O. 5313), sec. 5. The reglamento explicitly excludes “jornaleros” from the generic category of “transeuntes”.

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tránsito” according to the constitutional nationality clause. The 2004 immigration law since then rules: “The non-residents are considered persons in transit for the purpose of the application of Art. 11 of the Constitution”23. Those formally labelled “temporary workers” by the immigration law–even if they lived and worked in the Dominican Republic for years–are now on top of that labelled en tránsito when nationality law was concerned. As the main result, their children would not benefit from the ius soli principle. The 2004 modification of the immigration law thus declared the discriminating practise of excluding newborns from documentation–and hence from Dominican nationality–lawful in retrospect. Even further escalating this exclusion of “undesired” nationals, in the 2004 immigration law the Dominican government turned to explicitly prohibiting registering the children of undocumented mothers. The outright discrimination of children of undocumented mothers–read: with Haitian ancestry–was challenged legally by a group of Dominican NGOs who filed a complaint questioning the constitutionality of the new immigration law with the Dominican Supreme Court (SCJ). In December 2005 the highest legal body in the Dominican Republic, however, denied that the new law produced stateless children (for they would still be entitled to a Haitian nationality) and declared all objected articles in accordance with the constitution.24

Implicit denaturalisations What has been described above not only applies to newborns. The adjustment of the constitution’s de tránsito to explicitly include all “temporary” migrant workers by the migration law of 2004 amended the ius soli principle with a ius domicilii qualification. From now on, birthright nationality is only granted if (at least one of ) the parents are legally residing inside the national territory.25

23

“Los No Residentes son considerados personas en tránsito, para los fines de la aplicación del Artículo 11 de la Constitución de la República.” Ley No. 285-04 General de Migración, 27.8.2004 (G.O. 10291), art. 36, no. 10. 24 Boletín Judicial No. 1141, Sentencia No. 9, 14 Dec. 2005; cf. http://www.suprema. gov.do/consultas/consultas_sentencias/detalle_info_sentencias.aspx?ID=114110009. 25 This understanding of “tránsito” in the realm of immigration law has been confirmed by the 2011 implementing rule to the law of 2004, defining “transit” as “status of every for-

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As the Dominican constitution prohibits retroactive application of laws, the Supreme Court in the course of its 2005 constitutionality decision argued that the exclusion of all “transients” from the ius soli was already intended when the current wording of the nationality clause was introduced into the constitution in 1929. But if the constitution is interpreted this way–meaning, it has always excluded children of Haitian braceros from Dominican nationality–the consequences can amount to implicit and retrospective denaturalisations of those hitherto considered Dominicans. As in the case of refusing to register newborns as nationals, the administration might as well refuse to issue proof of nationality to adult Dominican nationals. In an ius soli system, a birth certificate is the main proof of someone’s nationality (Wooding, 2008, 368). It therefore depends on the possession of this document whether one is able or not to proof one’s nationality. In the Dominican Republic, this crucial birth certificate is not “valid” for an unlimited period, but has to be issued for a certain purpose by way of an official excerpt from the civil register. As this is needed for many legal procedures–for instance to open a bank account, to get married or divorced, to apply for a passport and of course to vote–, sooner or later everybody will have some kind of interaction with the Registry Office. After the 2005 Supreme Court decision, when asked for a copy from the civil register, the officers started questioning the parent’s legal position and started to refuse handing out these certificates even to adult citizen. The allegation in these cases is, that they might have been born to non-residents, read parents “in transit”, and have therefore never been legal citizens of the Dominican Republic. Not to certificate any official proof of nationality the authorities justify by claiming they’d be verifying the integrity of the original document (i.e. the data record in the civil registry and/or any extracts written out previously) for instance in cases of “foreign parents who have not proven residency or legal status.” By doing so, the Registry Office can effectively cease to hand out a new birth certificate to whatever applicant by way of calling it “suspending the expedition” for an indefinite period of time.26 This means that eigner with no permanent recidency”, cf. Reglamento de la aplicación de la Ley General de Migración No. 285-04 (19.10.2011), art. 3. 26 This procedure is ruled in the circular No. 17 of the Registry Office (published 29.3.2007), associating “irregularity” to “foreign parents that have not proven their residency and their legal status” (“padres extranjeros que no han probado su residencia y status legal en la República Dominicana”).

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any indication the applicant might have (grand-)parents who entered the Dominican Republic with a temporary permit only, will lead to a meticulous examination of the files and thus to the denial of “whatever document relative to the civil status”. The authorities are denying that this exclusion is aimed at Dominicans with Haitian ancestors,27 but even the UN Special Rapporteur confirms that the assumption is being made that if you have no documents and appear to be or have a name that is Haitian, you are an illegal migrant. While the Government reports that a large percentage of all Dominicans have no identification documents, in practice, this presumption of illegality is applied only to people with dark skins and Haitian features (Human Rights Council, 2008, para. 62).

Putting this in its historical context it is obvious that there are two excluding operations that are closely connected. First admitting Haitian workers as nothing more than “non-residents” and hence making them “illegal people” (Human Rights Watch, 2002). Framed as “temporary workers”, their legal position is no more than irregular when they are outside the plantation. By the next step their descendents inherit their parents and even their grandparent’s legal position–that is, their irregular immigration status. The current denial of nationality is a way of stipulating this exclusionary principle. As mentioned in the beginning, in January 2010 the Dominican Republic adopted a revised constitution, which adjusts the legal text to the administrative practice. The constitutional nationality clause, excluding transients and diplomats, was amended by the words: “or reside in Dominican territory illegally” (Art. 18, No. 3). This is the last step so far, making the ius domicilii requirement explicit, so that birthright nationality is only derived from a parent’s legal residency inside the territory.

THE NATIONAL LEGAL POSITION AS INTERDEPENDENT CATEGORISATION From the abstract perspective of social theory, legal categorisations of national membership–the constitutive distinction between nationals and foreigners, as much as categories of resident aliens, temporary workers, students, tourists 27

Resolución del Pleno de la Junta Central Electoral, 16.07.2008.

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and so on, that induce fundamentally different sets of rights–are institutionalised categorisations of everyday differentiations. On the empirically observable layer of human interactions, institutions and representations of everyday live, social categorisations like language, appearance, gender, age, wealth, legal position (and possibly many more) are necessarily intertwined, according to the given situation, and thus can never be adequately described on their own. Studies on intersectionality in the past focussed on the fact that various social categorisations of identity and difference interrelate with each other, influence and even create each other mutually. This interdependency28 of categorisations at the micro level of human interaction is empirically inevitable, hence theoretically not demanding. Much less work has been devoted to the relationship of macro level structures, mostly called race/class/ gender.29 This is a challenge also to my reasoning. What matters to me while doing empiric research is to make sure not to detach the description of lived and experienced differences among actors from a more theoretical question: What gives them their shape and makes them endure? That is to keep in mind that analysing quotidian practises always means to take into account the power of collective production of meaning and interpretation, or social orders of knowledge. In my case, being concerned with the national legal position, we have to ask for instance: Why can nation states legitimately discriminate against “foreigners”? Why can there be such an institution as “nationality” at all? A convincing answer to this question is that the distinction between nationals and foreigners is one of the most basic modern we-group constructions within “the national order of things” (Malkki, 1995; cf. also Balibar, 1990; Wallerstein, 2004). This can be–and often is–theorised as a structural relationship called “ethnicity” or “race” as well as “nationalism” or even “nationality/ethnicity.”30 The societal domain “ethnicity“ would hence be associated to “nationality” 28

Stressing that categorisations are “interdependent” simply means that they don’t operate on their own or independently; it doesn’t imply any privilege before “intersecting” (Crenshaw, 1989), “articulating” (McClintock, 1995), “interlocking” (Collins, 1993), “interacting” (Dhamoon, 2011) or other terms. 29 Knapp claimed in an article in 2005 that though there was a programmatic aim at intersections at the macro level, “most of the actual studies have concentrated more or less on micro-level analyses “ (Knapp, 2005, 259). 30 The structural category “ethnicity” or “nationalism” is understood then as corresponding with “collectivity” (Anthias) or “the political” (Klinger), one of the three “ontologies” or “subsystems” of modern society (like Klinger, 2008, 54 argues, cf. also Anthias, 2001, 377)

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insofar as membership in the modern nation state is understood as the concrete form of exclusion of the national Other and of the creation of sameness among the nationals of one state. The formal legal status “national” turns the symbolic distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ into something actors can experience as differentiating them from others. Thus, nationality can theoretically be defined as a technology of “ethnicity” or “race.” 31 But I think to relate the national legal position to one single dimension of power relations would be reductionist and hence erroneous. This criticism stems from the analysis of racialised legal exclusion in the Dominican Republic. If it is true that “nationality” implements race, this process will still be influenced by what is usually theoretically separated from race as gender and class. In lived reality the national legal position is not only a race-position, but also a gendered and a classed position. The theoretic distinction between race, class and gender might be valid as long we are using “social relations” strictly as abstract structural concepts, but doesn’t help us to substantially understand concrete practises as long as we are using each one of them in an isolated manner. Quite the opposite: The national legal position is structured by a complex interweaving of theoretical abstractions we could call race, class and gender. That’s why I call it an interdependent social categorisation. Instead of subscribing to a theoretic separation of structure and action, I understand social reality as a process of interpretations by the actors, based on former interpretations, shared, passed on, consolidated and modified by way of interactions with others (Keller, 2006, 115). This collective system of meaning structures the perception of the world. Action is therefore conveyed by “the socially constructed, typified, in varying degrees legitimately recog-

while “class” is related to production and “gender” to reproduction; cf. ibid. (Klinger, 2008, 54 relates “class” to economy and “gender” to the public/private divide). 31 Such approaches in social theory follow the Kantian tradition and think of structure as separated from action. Structural power relations would–by definition–be above quotidian challenges. They worked ‘behind the backs’ and independent from the understanding of the actors and influences (or ‘structure’) individual actions. I don’t support the understanding of race, class and gender as structures in the Kantian sense because that wouldn’t solve the classic theoretic problem of how abstract concepts of social structure relate to empirically observable quotidian experiences of humans: Do structures determine actions? One alternative would be to understand race/class/gender as a mere theoretical “grid”, as “signposts” for empirical research that seeks to understand modern societies’ basic “ontologies” (cf. Anthias, 2001 and this volume).

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nised and objectified knowledge” (Keller, 2006, 113, my translation). But this order of knowledge does not consist of determining rules. Rather, routinised knowledge is updated contextually and actively in situations of (inter)actions, yet also adapted and subjected to continuous transformation, since iterations necessarily evoke changes. A research perspective interested in the order of knowledge had therefore to disentangle the “discursive strings” only to show their essential entanglements. To do so, I suggest thinking of (“structural”) power relations as created, maintained and changed through actions, while they are simultaneously incorporated into the experience of individuals. What is at stake in researching interdependencies of social categorisations is to choose an analytical perspective that doesn’t fall short of analysing peoples actions as simultaneously being structured by and structuring the broader, impersonal social relations.32 This can be done by the analysis of social knowledge systems (or “discourses”, cf. Foucault, 1997; Keller, 2005). The legal system can be analysed as such a knowledge system–a practice at the same time structured and structuring. Shared tacit believes of legality and legitimacy of power as much as explicit sets of rules and decision-making procedures collapse complex constellation of (political) power into material artefacts, the positive norms. Therefore, while law’s claimed ambition to regulate people’s actions is questionable, it’s inherent normativity defines which actions are being seen as legitimate and which are considered deviant, thus forces actors to respond to hegemonic definitions of desired behaviour. In doing so the legal system serves as an impersonal social force that structures quotidian reality of those affected directly or indirectly by it. But though seemingly ‘natural’ because of the ubiquitous power of the legal system, legal national membership and its counterpart, the institutionalised exclusion of foreigners, are nothing less than self-evident, given, or even stable. On the contrary, national principles of in- and exclusion have to be reconstructed, affirmed, and tightened on an every-day basis to continue functioning, and thus can also be transformed and challenged by social actors.

32

The integration of structure and action has been addressed, among others, by Mannheims “Erfahrungswissen” (Mannheim, 1980); by Bourdieu’s theory of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977); by sociological theories of structures of the Lebenswelt (Schütz and Luckmann, 1975); by Giddens theory of “structuration” (Giddens, 1986) to name the most prominent. In the more narrowly defined area of research on intersectionality only Degele and Winker (2008) explicitly outline what they call a praxeological approach.

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This can be shown for the Dominican case, where the national legal position interacts with economic divisions. This means that legal differentiation–the cross-border recruitment of workers–allows not only for economic marginalisation of the migrants, but also for segregated and appalling living conditions of the legally differentiated work force. Under state control the Haitian braceros were, unlike any Dominican labourer, completely subjugated to the plantation owners they worked for throughout the 20th century. This was done by forceful state-ruled segregation backed up by immigration law, as I have shown above. And only then, the migrant workers could be addressed as racialised subjects. The national legal exclusions directly rely upon the idea that national Other is somehow different to the national We–and thus can be treated differently. In turn, Dominicans working in agriculture emphasised their non-Black consciousness in opposition to the degrading living and working conditions and the perceived homogeneity of the migrant labour force they could observe on the plantations. It was primarily due to their institutionalised demoted position that the two legal groupings could be experienced in real live as “racially different”. But racialised exclusion was never pure, i.e. constituted bare of any economic connotation: wealthy Black immigrants could even by 1930s Dominican legislation be admitted within the category of inmigrantes. What is more, this racialised taxonomy, that can historically be described with a certain classed structure (i.e. as part of the global division of labour, cf. Quijano, 2000, 539), was never gender blind: In the 19th and early 20th century it systematically excluded women from any independent legal position. Racial and class discourses about national identity were intrinsically linked to gender (Rosemblatt, 2002). That means that even on the ontological level, when looking at the nation form of social division, race, class and gender can not be separated but have to be taken into account concertedly. It is therefore crucial to understand national exclusion, be it immigration policies or nationality laws, as necessarily gendered, classed and ethnicised at once. To understand legal positions as products of an order of knowledge, as interwoven into collective social meaning, thus gives us the opportunity to both research the empirically accessible (inter-)actions and at the same time analyse how they are shaped by the collective production of meaning. Social meanings are necessarily interdependent: the ontological concepts of gender/race/class can only be theoretically defined separately, but have to be

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applied in research in an integrated way.33 Therefore, I call for always thinking of them as interdependent theoretical concepts. Returning to the topic at hand, the legal exclusions of Dominicans of Haitian descent, we are confronted with legal exclusion and its far reaching consequences. The theoretic considerations above suggest that discriminations like this are not questions of formal ascriptions alone, and cannot be resolved be fighting for legal equality alone–with this a necessary, but not sufficient prerequisite. Likewise, legal equality will not be gained by relying on legal advocacy alone (as pointed out by Wooding, 2008), because its denial relies and encompasses many non-legal social relations. Or, in other words, the legal position is not an independent category, but is interacting with various other social ascriptions among actors. It’s artificial isolation might be necessary in legal thought, and in the strategies of actors like human rights advocates who fight against legal discrimination of Dominicans of Haitian descent. But it falls short if we want to analyse its regulating power in everyday life–there we need to look at it as a knowledge system to understand and explain the power of the national legal position.

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33

For instance as heuristic tools rather than essential categories (cf. Anthias, 2001, 377 and this volume) or as “interlocking systems” that “need one another” shown by Razack, 1998, 13.

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BAUD, Michiel. “‘Constitutionally white’: the forging of a national identity in the Dominican Republic.” Ethnicity in the Caribbean: Essays in honor of Harry Hoetink. Ed. Gert J. Oostindie, and Harry Hoetink. London: Macmillan Caribbean 1996. 121-51. Warwick University Caribbean studies. — “Race and nation in the Dominican Republic.” New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 76.3/4 (2002): 312-21. BOURDIEU, Pierre. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, 1977. Cambridge studies in social anthropology 16. CAPDEVILA, Lauro. “Una discriminación organizada: las leyes de inmigración dominicana y la cuestión haitiana en el siglo XX.” Tebeto: Anuario del Archivo Histórico Insular de Fuerteventura, Anexo 5 (2004): 438-54. CASTILLO, José del. “La migración haitiana en la República Dominicana: nuevas dimensiones de un viejo problema.” Revista Dominicana de Política Exterior, 1.1 (2005): 13-25. COLLINS, Patricia Hill. “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Race, Sex, & Class, 1.1 (1993). COMISIÓN INTERAMERICANA DE DERECHOS HUMANOS. Informe sobre la situación de los derechos humanos en la República Dominicana 1999. CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-67. CUEVAS P., Héctor E. El azúcar se ahogo en la melaza: Quinientos años de azúcar. Santo Domingo: Inst. Tecnológico de Santo Domingo 1999. DEGELE, Nina, and Gabriele WINKER. “Praxeologisch differenzieren. Ein Beitrag zur intersektionalen Gesellschaftsanalyse.” Über-Kreuzungen: Fremdheit, Ungleichheit, Differenz. Ed. Cornelia Klinger, and Gudrun-Axeli Knapp. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2008. 194-209. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 23. DHAMOON, Rita Kaur. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.” Political Research Quarterly, 64.1 (2011): 230-43. EARNEST, David. Voting Rights for Resident Aliens: A Comparison of 25 Democracies: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the North Eastern Political Science Association, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Philadelphia 2003. Web. 26 Jul. 2012. . FERGUSON, James. Migration in the Caribbean: Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Beyond 2003. FOUCAULT, Michel. Archäologie des Wissens. 8th ed. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1997. Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. GELLNER, Ernest. Nations and nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1983. GÈZE, François. “L’héritage colonial au coer de la politique étrangère française.” La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de là héritage colonial. Ed. Pascal Blanchard, and Nicolas Bancel. Paris: La Découverte 2006.

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GIDDENS, Anthony. The constitution of society - outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press 1986. GOSEWINKEL, Dieter. Einbürgern und Ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2001. GROSS, Ariela J. “Race, Law, and Comparative History.” Law & History Review, 29.2 (2011): 549. GROUPE D’APPUI AUX REFUGIES ET RAPATRIES (GARR). Rapport annuel sur la situation des droits humains des haïtiens/nes dans la migration et a la frontiere haïtiano?dominicaine en 2008. Port-au-Prince, Haiti 2009. HAYDUK, Ronald. Democracy for all: Restoring immigrant voting rights in the United States. New York: Routledge 2006. HOETINK, Harry. “The Dominican Republic, c. 1870-1930.” The Cambridge History of Latin America: Volume 4, c.1870 to 1930. Ed. Leslie Bethell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986. 287-305. HOWARD, David. Coloring the nation: Race and ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. Oxford: Signal, et al. 2001. HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL. Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène, and the independent expert on minority issues, Gay McDougall 2008. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH. “Illegal people”: Haitians And Dominico-Haitians In The Dominican Republic 2002. Human Rights Watch reports Volume 14 1 (B). INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW CLINIC. Unwelcome Guests: A Study of Expulsions of Haitians And Dominicans of Haitian Descent from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Berkeley 2002. ISIN, Engin F., and Bryan S. TURNER. “Citizenship studies: An introduction.” Handbook of citizenship studies. Repr. Ed. Engin F. Isin, and Bryan S. Turner. Los Angeles: Sage 2008. 1-10. JACOBSON, Robin. “Characterizing Consent: Race, Citizenship, and the New Restrictionists.” Political Research Quarterly, 59.4 (2006): 645-54. KELLER, Reiner. Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse: Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005. — “Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse.” Handbuch sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse. Ed. Reiner Keller, et al. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2006. 113-43 Vol. 1: Theorien und Methoden. KLINGER, Cornelia. “Überkreuzende Identitäten – Ineinandergreifende Strukturen. Plädoyer für einen Kurswechsel in der Intersektionalitätsdebatte.” Über-Kreuzungen: Fremdheit, Ungleichheit, Differenz. Ed. Cornelia Klinger, and Gudrun-Axeli Knapp. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2008. 38-67. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 23.

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SAGÁS, Ernesto. Race and politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2000. SASSEN, Saskia. Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006. SCHÜTZ, Alfred, and Thomas LUCKMANN. Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Neuwied, et al.: Luchterhand 1975. Soziologische Texte 82. TEJEDA, Eddy. “Migración haitiana y Ley de Migración en la República Dominicana: Le Blocage.” Los retos del desarrollo insular: Desarrollo sostenible, migraciones y derechos humanos en las relaciones domínico-haitianas en el siglo XXI. Ed. Wilfredo Lozano, and Bridget Wooding. Santo Domingo: FLACSO, CIES, UNIBE 2008. 301-19. TORRES-SAILLANT, Silvio. “The tribulations of blackness: stages in Dominican racial identity.” Latin American Perspectives, 25.3 (1998): 126-47. WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel Maurice. World-systems analysis: An introduction. Durham: Duke University Press 2004. WIMMER, Andreas. Nationalist exclusion and ethnic conflict: Shadows of modernity. 1. publ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. WOODING, Bridget. “Contesting Dominican Discrimination and Statelessness.” Peace Review, 20.3 (2008): 366-75. WOODING, Bridget, and Richard MOSELEY-WILLIAMS. Inmigrantes haitianos y dominicanos de ascendencia haitiana en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: SID/CID 2004.

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CLASS, CITIZENSHIP, ETHNICITY: CATEGORIES OF SOCIAL DISTINCTION AND IDENTIFICATION IN CONTEMPORARY

CHINA

Björn Alpermann

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of China’s dynamic social development, this chapter adopts the research perspective of intersectionality to study institutions and discourses that create, sustain and legitimise social inequalities. A special focus is placed on the social categories of class, citizenship and ethnicity and the role of the party-state in their definition and use as markers of difference and identification. Comparing the Mao era to the post-1978 reform period, the chapter brings out the salient role played by the party-state, but also the increased spaces for meaning-making available to social actors in the recent years.

Since the start of its reforms more than three decades ago, China has been experiencing a period of high-speed economic growth combined with significant social changes such as large-scale population movements, rapid urbanisation and increasing stratification. Overall, living standards have been rising quickly, and particularly in the first decade of reforms millions of Chinese have been lifted out of dire poverty. However, especially since the 1990s, the level of income inequality has increased dramatically, from very low levels during the pre-reform Mao era of state socialism. In particular, urban–rural disparities have become more pronounced (Riskin, Zhao, and Li, 2001). At the same time, China’s economy is becoming ever more closely connected with international markets. Since these rapid changes are all happening simultaneously, some authors have described China as experiencing a “compressed modernity” (Beck and Grande, 2010, 409-43; Han and Shim, 2010, 471-4). What makes China’s transformation all the more remarkable is that it is taking place under the unbroken leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and with only limited reforms of its Leninist political system. This combination of a market society and communist politics, or “market socialism” (Hsu, 2007), challenges us to think afresh about how society is structured and reorganised during such a process of rapid modernisation.

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Therefore, this chapter sets out to study social categorisations in China and how these have evolved over time. It specifically focuses on class, citizenship and ethnicity because these are held to be of particular importance in understanding how China’s experience of modernisation relates to that of other societies discussed in this volume. Stress is laid on the interdependencies between different social categorisations that can be understood to “intersect”. The next section develops this idea of intersectionality, while the following sections deal with the concepts of class, citizenship and ethnicity in the case of contemporary China.

INTERSECTIONALITY AS A RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE Intersectionality first emerged as a paradigm in gender studies in the United States and focused on the classical triad of social categorisations: class, race and gender (Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik, 2010, 9-13; Dhamoon, 2011, 234). The idea that different social categorisations have to be researched together as they all contribute to creating complex inequalities in society is not new. What is new about the concept of intersectionality is that it is seen as an attempt to overcome additive perspectives, such as “double discrimination”, for instance, through gender and race. These additive perspectives themselves represented progress compared to uni-dimensional explanations of inequality that tended to homogenise the populations within each category. But they fall short when it comes to recognising the complex interconnections and interdependencies between different social categorisations (Walgenbach, 2011, 116-8). According to proponents of intersectionality, class, race and gender have to be understood as “interlocking systems of oppression” (Collins cited in Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik, 2010, 11). What makes the concept of intersectionality attractive as a research perspective is, first, that it stresses the interconnections between different social categorisations. According to Walgenbach (2011, 118), these should even be treated as one integrated unit in social analysis. Second, intersectionality recognises the internal heterogeneity of social categorisations (ibid.). Therefore, it explicitly recognises contingencies: What it means to be “black” or a “woman” differs widely depending on how a whole range of other processes of categorisation play out simultaneously. But in doing so, intersectionality does not lose sight of the structural characteristics of social inequality and

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macro-categories that make sociological studies of inequality possible in the first place (Degele, 2010, 180-1). Intersectionality is sometimes criticised for being unclear in respect to the level of analysis: Is the focus on identities, experiences, systems of domination or categorisations? Walgenbach (2011, 121) argues, however, that it is exactly this kind of indetermination that allows intersectionality to claim the status of a paradigm. Degele (2010), on the other hand, proposes to proceed deductively from a set of macro-sociological categorisations that have to fit the case under scrutiny, and “intersect” these with more subjective categories that are determined inductively during the research process. Thus, she distinguishes between the structural and individual levels of analysis, while combining the two. In a similar vein, Dhamoon (2011, 233) distinguishes between identity (“black”), category (“race”), process (“racialisation”) and system of domination (“racism”) to clarify which level a given analysis can address. Moreover, she argues for integrating intersectionality-type perspectives into the mainstream of political analysis (ibid.). With respect to China, Cartier (2009, 380) also argued for the adoption of poststructural feminist perspectives in the study of contemporary society: These perspectives include the social construction of gender and differential positions of age, class, and sexuality that shape individual and collective identities and realities of citizenship experience. Citizenship-subjectivity in China is also defined by hukou, the registered permanent residence system that has prevented rural migrants from attaining full citizenship status in cities.

Thus, like Degele, she proposed to integrate commonly used categories with those specific to China, like the hukou system (more on that below). While in principle subscribing to such a holistic perspective, the major thrust of this chapter, which is designed to give an overview of social categorisations in China, relates to the structural level of analysis. This places the focus on institutions and discourses that create, sustain and legitimise social inequalities, or what Dhamoon (2011, 235) calls processes and systems. Focusing on the structural level seems well justified, as it “draws attention to the doing and making of difference and serves to show that subjects are socially produced as identities and are engaged in the production of subjectivities through institutionalised discursive practices” (Dhamoon, 2011, 235, emphasis in original). However, I recognise explicitly that the pre-selected

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categories must be combined with others that are derived in an open research process if one is to develop a fuller understanding of the perspectives of social actors themselves (cf. Hsu, 2007). Thus, where necessary and appropriate I also address the agency of social actors in constructing their identities. I will also confine myself to the categories of class, citizenship and ethnicity, and only occasionally mention gender. Discussions of intersectionality have resulted in various proposals to expand or alter the original triad of class, race and gender, usually depending on the research context (Walgenbach, 2011, 119-121; Degele, 2010, 183). I have selected class and citizenship, because these two are intimately connected in the Chinese case and go a long way to explaining social inequality and exclusion. Class generally refers to stratification of societies according to socio-economic differences, but has been used in China in various more specific definitions discussed below. Citizenship is understood here to mean that a person enjoys the full rights of a citizen as defined in the constitution and other relevant laws, in social, cultural, economic and political respects. In the institutional context of an authoritarian state such as the People’s Republic of China, this “socialist citizenship” of course still falls far short of the liberal ideal of full guarantees of human rights and civil liberties since these are granted only conditionally even in legal documents. But the idea of “socialist citizenship” provides a yardstick to measure the (degree of ) exclusion or inclusion of individuals or groups by the Chinese state. I address ethnicity,1 since it is often overlooked in discussions of China’s social inequality, and more commonly studied from an anthropological perspective. Furthermore, the concept of “ethnicity” serves to link this paper with several other contributions to this volume. Ethnicity refers to belonging to an ethnic group, whereas ethnic groups are characterised by (i) seeing themselves as different from others, (ii) being perceived as differing from others and (iii) partaking in common activities that refer to the (real or imagined) common ancestry of that group (Bös, 2008, 55). That gender is dealt with only in passing should not suggest that it is unimportant. Rather, it is 1 Although there are good arguments why “race” is used by other authors (Degele 2010, 179; Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik 2010, 19-22), I prefer “ethnicity”. This is not just due to particular German sensibilities, but also because biologistic arguments that other authors want to highlight by using “race” seem to play at most a minor role in the relevant discussions in and on China.

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much too large a topic to be fully treated within the confines of this short contribution. The next section discusses the state socialist Mao era, thereby providing a backdrop for the subsequent section, which focuses on the reform era.

THE MAO ERA (1949 - LATE 1970S) Class and citizenship in Mao’s China It is hardly surprising that the CCP, having come to power in a revolution on behalf of workers and peasants, would proceed to make class the most crucial dimension of social categorisation. Following Marx class was understood as being based on social relations to the means of production. However, the party-state simultaneously used this socio-economic category to determine one’s political status as citizen: An individual either belonged to “the people” or was considered an “enemy of the people”. Only members of the people were supposed to have the right to speak up, while enemies were to be struggled against politically (Spence, 1991, 514-515). In the early years of the People’s Republic, the CCP systematically conducted mass campaigns in cities and countryside to attach “class labels” to each family, carefully crafting a socialist hierarchy. For instance, only the more “revolutionary” strata were organised into “poor and lower-middle peasants associations” in order to participate in local politics, even if their role remained limited (Burns, 1988, 835). But the new social hierarchy was influential beyond the political realm: Class labels became so important that they even affected marriage patterns (ibid., 169). The paradox of this system lies in the fact that it was introduced at the same time that the socialist transformation of the economy extinguished the fundamental basis of these distinctions (So, 2003, 364). Thus, the class labels actually degenerated into a purely political and hereditary status ascription. Moreover, as CCP Chairman Mao Zedong became increasingly concerned about the threat of “revisionism” in the 1960s, he began to see “bourgeois” elements on the advance. Unleashing “class struggle” during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in part to remedy this, Mao opened the way for increasingly arbitrary accusations to be made against people seen as “following the capitalist road”. Anyone, up to the highest party leaders, could now be labelled a “capitalist roader” and deprived of socialist citizenship.

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Thus, the class/citizenship categorisation, although generally fixed, provided no protection against such assaults during the late Mao period. The second major dividing line in Mao’s China was that between town and country. The hukou (household registration system) instituted in the late 1950s created a basically insurmountable barrier between rural and urban dwellers, so that some authors likened the result to an “estate society” (Scharping, 1995) or even a “caste system” (Potter and Potter, 1990, 296312). Being a member of a people’s commune meant that a peasant was tied to the soil. Although slightly more mobility was possible within urban China, workers were also confined to their “work units” (danwei) and subjected to “organised dependency” (Walder, 1986; Bray, 2005). Through this system of urban-rural bifurcation, the socialist state determined life chances and organised resource distribution in highly unequal ways (Kipnis, 2008, 75). Workers, in official rhetoric hailed as “masters of the country” and thus enjoying the fullest citizenship rights available under socialism, were still further stratified according to their work unit’s standing in the hierarchy of the state’s economic bureaucracy (Walder, 1992). In sum, the newly founded party-state fundamentally transformed China’s social makeup, purposively destroying old hierarchies and replacing these with new ones (Yan, 2010, 492-3; Lu, 2010, 388-90). Socio-economic and political status categories became closely intertwined and generally fixed, although political mass campaigns introduced a degree of insecurity since even a “good” class background could be of little use against accusations of ideological mistakes. Interestingly, with respect to gender, the CCP’s role was equally influential, yet not in the way its revolutionary promise of “women holding up half the sky” would suggest. Instead of working for gender equality–though improvements were made–the party effectively denied the legitimacy of women’s demands by classifying them as “bourgeois feminism” (Edwards, 2008, 203-5). Thus, by linking the issues of class and gender the CCP subjected the latter to the former and argued that true liberation of women could only be achieved when the socialist transformation had run its course.

Ethnic classification and ethnicity The role of the socialist state in creating social categorisations and assigning individuals to these is equally pronounced in the case of ethnicity, if not

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more so. In the 1950s the CCP conducted a large-scale ethnic classification project (minzu shibie) that resulted in the official designation of 55 “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu2) plus the majority group, the Han. This project is a matter of considerable debate in Western anthropology to this day, whereas the “56 minzu paradigm” is considered sacrosanct within China (Harrell, 1995a; Tapp, 2002; Yang, 2009). From today’s vantage point, the ethnic classification project may look like a typical case of “internal orientalism” (Schein, 1997) in which the majority-dominated state assigns “ethnic” status and names particular groups,3 thereby creating boundaries between communities, some of which were newly created entities (Kaup, 2000). Inevitably, these categories became the basis for a hierarchy of ethnic groups with the majority Han-Chinese at the top, as demonstrated below. However, as Mullaney (2011) shows in great detail, creating such boundaries was not the CCP government’s intention from the very beginning. Reexamining the first census of 1952/53, he highlights the fact that the CCP–which before coming to power in 1949 promised self-determination for ethnic minorities–at first approached the nationality question quite openly: Contrary to what one might expect from a freshly installed communist government bent on creating a nation-state, the census queried ethnic categorisation in an open-ended way–leaving a blank space for each respondent to fill in with which group s/he self-identified. From the perspective of a

2 The term shaoshu minzu is officially translated as “national minorities”, although the correct translation would be “minority nationalities”. It is used as an equivalent to “ethnic group”, although the reference to “nation” may create the problem of “politicisation”, as Ma (2007) argues. In this essay I will use the terms minzu and its translations to refer to the stateset framework, while reserving the term “ethnicity” for self-identification by members of ethnic groups. This follows Yang (2009, 744), who wrote that “while ethnicity is shifting and flexible, minzu is fixed and exclusive”. On shifting meanings of the term see Barabantseva, 2008. The initial classification of the 1950s resulted in 53 shaoshu minzu being recognised, while two smaller ones received official recognition later (the Keba in 1965 and the Jinuo in 1979). Since then, identification work has been put on hold and declared “basically finished” despite some unresolved cases involving “hundreds of thousands of people” whose ethnic categorisation is not officially determined (Yang, 2009, 756). 3 Interestingly, from the perspective of intersectionality, Schein (1997) and others have argued that this process also involved a “gendering” of ethnic minorities as female (and therefore inferior), but there are apparent exceptions to this observation (Hillman and Henfry, 2006).

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modernising (i.e. rationalising) state, the result was catastrophic: More than 400 ethnonyms emerged from this survey, for a population that made up only 6 per cent of the total population.4 Famously, the southwestern province of Yunnan alone accounted for 260 of these ethnonyms. Yet, as an analysis of the census data elucidates, not all of these ethnonyms could be considered to constitute “ethnic groups”, since many of them appeared only very infrequently (some even just once or twice).5 Therefore, the government decided to conduct the above-mentioned classification project to “come to terms with the nation” (Mullaney, 2011). The project faced a crucial dilemma from the very beginning: The politics of the time required taking into account Stalin’s four criteria for identifying a nationality–namely, “[a] common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture” (quoted in Yang, 2009, 762). Yet, very few of China’s ethnic groups would fit such a definition. Moreover, Stalin argued that these four criteria were only fully developed during the capitalist stage of development, thus connecting the concept of ethnicity with that of class formation. However, in the mid-twentieth century, this stage had not even come to pass in Han-dominated parts of China. Therefore, Stalin’s proposition generated lively debate in Chinese scholarly circles and proved impossible to put into practice in the ethnic classification campaign (Yang, 2009, 762-7). As Mullaney (2011) details, the CCP’s “solution” to this dilemma was to be considerably flexible in the application of Stalin’s criteria, while nevertheless paying lip service to them. In reality, the major part of the classification was based on linguistic studies–in Yunnan’s case, it was based on a linguistic model developed at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century that had been popularised in China during the pre-1949 Republican period and, ironically, had been written by an English colonial officer and part-time anthropologist. The resulting number of 25 shaoshu minzu in Yunnan is also revealingly close to categorisations of

4

The official census figure for the minority population given for 1953 is 35.32 million. The percentage dropped to 5.76 in the next census (1964), but recovered and rose with every census since then: 6.68 in 1982, 8.04 in 1990, 8.41 in 2000 and 8.49 in 2010. Thus, the official figure for China’s minority population now stands at 113.74 million (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010, 2011). 5 Thus, the often repeated story of “over 400 ethnic groups applying for recognition as minzu” (Yang, 2009, 750) has to be questioned.

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“barbarians” formulated in imperial times (Yang, 2009, 772). In fact, several authors draw attention to the continuities of ethnic classifications across the 1949 historical divide (e.g. Harrell, 1995b), while others highlight how some results of the minzu classification are at odds with local self-identification of ethnicity and cultural practices (Brown, 2001; Wu, 2005). As seen above, the ethnic classification project was started as a reaction to the failure to arrive at an acceptable (from the party-state’s point of view) number of ethnic groups in a bottom-up way through the 1952/53 census. But it was not entirely top-down either. Instead, linguists presented the results of their work to local elites to make them “recognise”, for instance, their similarity with other groups previously conceived as cultural “others” so that they would consent to being placed into the same minzu category (Mullaney, 2011). Apart from local ethnic elites, local governments played a crucial role in this process, too (Yang, 2009). In spite of some obviously arbitrary decisions as a result of the classification campaign, Tapp argues that it should not be seen as “merely a national, and nationalist, project, but also as a socialist one. […] [I]n its inception and origins, and in the motivations of many if not most of its participants, the project represented a genuine attempt, on the part of a newly founded state, to undertake an ethnographic inquiry, of what it thought to be a scientific type, into the nature and extent of cultural variety and difference” (2002, 68).6 But the ultimate goal of such an ethnographic enquiry was still to create citizens by determining their minzu: affixing the ethnic label amounted to integrating them into the newly formed state, granting them rights and subjecting them to the duties that come along with citizenship. Moreover, being a socialist project, the classification simultaneously also specified the socio-economic status of each group: Based on Lewis H. Morgan’s theory of human development as rendered by Friedrich Engels, Chinese researchers placed each minzu somewhere along the evolutionary path of societies from primitive to slave-owner to feudal. Of course, no minzu could be classified in the “higher” and “later” stages of capitalism or socialism, and it was obvious that the majority Han were the group farthest along, before the revolution having simply been stuck in a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” posi6

One might add that contemporary discussions of China’s ethnic classification project should take into account that anthropology in the West was itself just breaking free of its colonial origins in the early 1950s.

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tion.7 Thus, minzu became not just an ethnic category but a comprehensive social categorisation (at least for the minorities). In the Mao era official discourse primarily defined minzu wenti or the “nationality question” in terms of class (Barabantseva, 2008). For this very reason, any expressions of ethnic identity were frowned upon or even actively suppressed during the phases of Maoist radicalism such as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution: They were signs that the individual or group in question was resisting socialist progress and the party line. Thus, in these phases of radicalism, the minzu categorisation became most intimately linked not only to socio-economic status but also to political status–being pro- or antiparty, in effect being a “citizen” or an “enemy of the people” and thus a potential target of political struggle. Being compelled to reject their own cultural heritage created deep wounds and resentment among members of ethnic minority groups.8 Thus, it is far from surprising that the general relaxation of politics in the reform era led to a resurgence of ethnic consciousness and expressions of ethnic identity, just as it led to socio-economic differentiation and the emergence of new classes or strata.

THE REFORM ERA (LATE 1970S - TODAY) Class and citizenship in reform-era China The passing of Mao and the end of class struggle led to profound changes in the way social categories played out in China. The economic reforms set in motion by the new leadership under Deng Xiaoping became the primary focus. On the level of representation, class was de-emphasised and hereditary class labels were lifted (Guo, 2008; Anagnost, 2008). Structurally, economic reforms opened up new opportunities for social and spatial mobility (Scharping, 1995): The stratificational order of state socialism was gradually replaced by that of an emerging market society (Yan, 2010, 497-9; Lu, 2010, 390-7; 7 It has variously been observed that this is the modern-day equivalent to the Confucian view that treated “barbarians” surrounding the Middle Kingdom as less civilised, but generally civilisable if they adopted Han ways (Ma, 2007, 202-5). 8 See for instance the exchange between Wang (2002) and Shakya (2002) on the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, and in more detail Goldstein, Jiao, and Lhundrup (2009).

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Bian, 2002). As detailed elsewhere (Alpermann, 2011, 14-7), this can most clearly be seen when examining two extremes of this process of social polarisation. On the one hand, private businesspeople have experienced an extraordinary ascendance. Though vilified and prosecuted during the Mao era, they were reluctantly accepted and gradually elevated in official rhetoric over the 1980s as the private sector grew significantly (Heberer, 2001, 63-73). By 2001, the CCP’s then-General Secretary Jiang Zemin had even paved the way for admitting private entrepreneurs into the party. Popular prejudice against “low-quality people” or “profiteers” among private businesspeople is still entrenched (Hanser, 2006, 463; Shen, 2008, 81-5) but is nowadays mostly confined to “individual business households” (getihu) operating shops or restaurants on a fairly small scale. The proprietors of swankier private companies, especially in new industries, are generally well respected. To rationalise their success, popular narratives draw on the state-sponsored notion of suzhi (Hsu, 2007, 122-56). This term roughly translates as “quality” and connotes formal education as well as cultural and moral refinement. In contemporary China it is being promoted (and popularly accepted) as the most crucial characteristic distinguishing the modern citizen (Murphy, 2004; Kipnis, 2006). Against this backdrop, the social category of “private entrepreneur” was turned from being an object of class struggle to serving as the basis for full citizenship rights, with the leading members of this group being recruited into the party or representative posts in people’s congresses and the like (Dickson, 2003), while others engaged in more individualised forms of political agency (Delman and Yin, 2010). On the other hand, peasants–while benefitting especially in the early stages of reform–were given a rough deal. The dismantling of people’s communes set them free to chase their luck in the cities where they created a new class of “peasant workers” (nongmingong). Current estimates of this new stratum run up to 250 million people (Ma, 2012). Their undeniable contribution to China’s economic success led to a gradual elevation in official rhetoric in this case, too (cf. Florence, 2006; Alpermann, 2011, 16). But the cornerstone of Chinese citizenship discourses are material rights (Keane, 2001), and in this respect the above-mentioned household registration system is still holding them back: Unable to get an urban hukou they are in effect excluded from “local citizenship” (Smart and Smart, 2001). This means they generally cannot partake in public social services such as health care, social security or

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schooling for their children, or at least have to pay dearly to do so. This situation has basically remained unchanged in spite of some well-intentioned policies by the central government in recent years (Davies and Ramia, 2008; Chan and Buckingham, 2008). Kipnis (2008, 189) compares “the reform era production of migrant illegality, deportability, and, indeed exploitability” with international migration/citizenship debates and finds much the same mechanisms at work (ibid., ch. 8). However, increasing activism on the part of peasant-workers, especially the new “second generation” (Tang and Yang, 2008), has led some observers to interpret their social position from the perspective of class formation as “unfinished proletarianisation” (Chan and Pun, 2009; Pun and Lu, 2010). Nevertheless, while this characterisation suggests that migrant workers are passively suffering the stratification effects of global capitalism, it should be recognised that they are also actively participating in the processes of creating and maintaining social distinctions. First, through consuming what is deemed modern and urban they attempt to recast themselves (Griffiths, 2010). Second, by participating in “quality”-raising efforts they follow the trend in Chinese society that values suzhi as the most crucial measure of social achievements (Lin and Tong, 2008). And finally, by voicing their economic and social complaints they are also engaged in a constant and increasingly open contestation for citizenship (Solinger, 1999; Lee, 2007). So, while global capitalism and the Chinese party-state (Yan, 2010, 501) play indisputable roles in the formation (on the structural level) and definition (on the level of meanings and representations) of social classes such as migrant workers, their own agency in these processes should not be overlooked (Alpermann, 2010, 2011). The same observation can also be made in respect to the middle classes, who are increasingly engaging in a process of social distinction by consumption (Shen, 2008, 164-75; Cartier, 2009; Zhang, 2010; Elfick, 2011). This “distinction work” (Hanser, 2007), apparently a private and market-driven activity, is also heavily structured by the state, for instance through the practice of “socio-spatial engineering” observed by Thornton (2010). And as Anagnost (2008, 499) argues, the aspiration to recreate oneself as a “consumer-citizen” extends far beyond the middle classes, even including rural migrants: Citizen-subjects were no longer defined as equal members of a collective political body but by the degree of their individual progress towards middle-class sta-

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tus. […] The new normative figure of citizenship is, therefore, the person endowed with high cultural capital and the power to consume (ibid.).

Significantly, these processes of class formation are made possible only by the intersecting of class, citizenship and gender. To achieve and maintain their middle-class lifestyles, upwardly mobile urban families depend on rural migrants, be the latter workers constructing and decorating the former’s new houses, or gardeners and security personnel in their gated communities (Zhang, 2010). As Sun (2008) demonstrates, this construction also includes a gender dimension, as new constructions of middle-class femininity are made possible only by employing housemaids to execute the menial tasks of housework. Middle-class women who want to spend “quality time” with their children can thrust the dirtier tasks (such as changing diapers) onto their maids. However, this idealised middle-class motherhood is made possible only by simultaneously changing the motherhood of migrant women, who have to leave their own children behind in their home villages or migrant settlements in city outskirts (Sun, 2008). Thus, class and gender, on one hand, and urban versus rural citizenship, on the other, intersect as rural maids are necessary for the self-actualisation of middle-class women (and men who adorn themselves with these women). Even the social activism undertaken by the more well-off women on behalf of the same group of rural migrant women workers can be read as distinction work, since it demonstrates the former’s superiority in suzhi (Fu, 2009). Therefore, new social hierarchies are being formed in China through a complex process of intermeshing social categorisations.

Ethnicity and ethnic revival The general relaxation of the political climate under post-Mao reforms also enabled a revival of ethnic identities and sentiments. With the end of the Cultural Revolution, ethnicity was no longer simply equated with clinging to reactionary or feudal remnants and resisting the progress toward socialism. Apart from that, there were two tangible political reasons for the substantial increase of self-identified minorities in the early 1980s: i) “affirmative action” in education, and ii) privileges in the population control programme. The latter granted exceptions to China’s newly introduced “one-child” policy

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(Scharping, 2003). In the sense that this rule made legal “non-persons” out of those born “out-of-quota” (Greenhalgh, 2003), it intersected with citizenship: Unplanned births give rise to “unplanned persons” without access to schools, village land, etc., in essence creating “stratified citizenship” (Greenhalgh, 2003, 198). In the sense that ethnic minorities were subject to more lenient regulations, they were less likely to become excluded through this mechanism.9 However, more relevant to this chapter is the first policy field mentioned above, education, which entails instruction in native languages along with easier access to senior middle schools and–most crucially–to colleges and universities (Sautman, 1998). As educational credentials regained their importance in Deng’s China, these policies provided routes toward social ascendance previously only available through cadre training, which necessitated distancing oneself from one’s ethnic identity for the sake of the party line. However, it is obvious that not all minzu were equally well positioned to grasp these opportunities. Some groups, such as Koreans of China’s northeast, did quite well, even earning “model minority” status (Gao, 2008). But most of them, living in remote and mostly poor regions, in fact suffered from the generally declining standards of rural public services that accompanied the decentralising reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. There are, of course, problems inherent in the education of ethnic minorities living in difficult socioeconomic situations and, undeniably, some progress has been made even there (Gelek, 2006). But some problems remain intractable, such as the question of what language to use as the medium of instruction–and up to which level and in which courses–in order to effectively raise educational levels among minorities. This question is being hotly debated among experts (Mackerras, 2006, 305), and it appears to require answers that are sensitive to local particularities. Yet it seems these are often ignored in favour of following higher-level educational guidelines and the “mainstream” (Wang, 2007).10

9

This is not to say that population policy in the case of ethnic minorities was unproblematic. However, accusations of “genocide”, sometimes voiced in respect to Tibet, seem widely overblown and probably distract from other, more relevant issues, such as exclusion of rural Tibetans from urban citizenship (Sautman, 2006; Fischer, 2008). 10 Minzu children (or parents) may opt out of education in their native tongue in favour of one in standard Chinese. They may do so either at specifically designated schools for ethnic minorities or at general (Han-dominated) schools. Furthermore, when taking the university

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This reveals a crucial intersection between class, citizenship and ethnicity: On the one hand, schools are major sites in which social stratification is determined, even opening the way to urban hukou status for university graduates. On the other, they are also instruments of the state to form citizens. Although there is no guarantee that this state effort will be successful (Kipnis, 2011), it can be argued that it takes on particular significance in the case of ethnic minorities (Hansen, 1999). As Lin Yi’s careful work in an ethnically diverse region of northwest China has shown, this poses a “citizenship dilemma”, as one must choose to be either “ordinary” or a minority (Lin, 2006). Participating in “mainstream” education offers better chances of upward social mobility but also means that crucial markers of ethnic identity, such as command of one’s native language or knowledge of ethnic cultural practices, have to be sacrificed. Furthermore, different ethnic groups are affected in various ways, since they are embedded in discursive practices that cast them in particular social positions–for instance, making it more difficult for Muslim children to participate in this upward mobility than for Tibetans (Lin, 2007). Lin argues that at the heart of this problem lies “the ambiguity of the state policy that on the one hand guarantees citizens’ rights to cultural freedom and on the other hand keeps sanctioning these rights, which are embedded in the party-state’s ambivalence over the package of state nation-building and minority rights” (Lin, 2005, 2). If there is a discernible trend to resolve this ambivalence in recent years, then it is the increasing propagation of mainstream education using Mandarin Chinese instead of minority languages, effectively facilitating cultural assimilation (Becquelin, 2004, 375). However, even for those who choose this road and advance to graduate from the best national universities, the prospects are still dimmed by discrimination they face in the job market (Hasmath, 2009; Zukosky, 2012, 252). In part, entrenched prejudices against ethnic minorities in China can be traced back to official discourses and related government policies such as the “western development project” (xibu da kaifa) (Barabantseva, 2009). Since the late 1970s the policy of “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) to the outside world created and reinforced huge regional disparities in favour of entrance exams (gaokao), minzu candidates may choose between taking the test for minorities or the general one (a practice called min kao han). In each instance, the second option can be regarded as closer to mainstream education.

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the coastal east. Those minorities living in remote rural areas in the west have been most negatively affected, although it needs to be recognised that these areas also comprise huge numbers of Han and that far from all minorities do live in the western region. However, as Barabantseva (2009) demonstrates, the way “western development” is cast in official discourse homogenises China’s highly diverse ethnic minorities and ethnicises poverty. Moreover, in an echo to earlier evolutionist propositions, official discourses on quality (suzhi) tend to blame minorities themselves for their alleged “backwardness” and poverty. “Today, the concept of minzu, or nationality, is used in conjunction with quality to explain the increasing prevalence and concentration of poverty in minority areas” (Zukosky, 2012, 240). For instance, in Zukosky’s case-study, this discourse also serves to assign members of the Kazak nationality the lowly social rank of animal herders, thereby excluding them from better-paying and higher-ranking urban employment (Zukosky, 2012, 256). In other words, the suzhi discourse reinforces their subordinate subject position in terms of class, citizenship and ethnicity. The language of such discourse obscures local agency that can, nevertheless, be found in local counter-discourse (ibid.). Needless to say, ethnic minorities have also been increasingly involved in migration from their mostly rural backgrounds to urban centres (Iredale and Guo, 2003). It is often in these contexts that members of ethnic minorities become more aware of social distinctions between themselves and the urban (read: modern) mainstream of society (Schein, 1997). On the other hand, blending into the mainstream means giving up part of their ethnic status as some preferential policies, such as relaxations of birth control policies, only apply to those minority persons living in designated minority areas (Barabantseva, 2009, 248-9). Therefore Barabantseva (2009, 230) calls this “ethnic citizenship” in China a localised one: Associating with the qualities of a modern Chinese citizen means eschewing ethnic minority status in practice. All that remains is the stamp in one’s passport or identity document to designate the ethnic group one belongs to (ibid., 249).

On the other hand, the more entrepreneurial minority migrants in the cities–often from Muslim groups–open “ethnic” restaurants or engage in expanding trade networks (Goodman, 2005). But many also have to sustain themselves in the most demeaning jobs as their ethnic status intersect-

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ing with their rural background further depresses their social standing. Ironically, for some the move from periphery to centre has also opened up some leeway to express their dissatisfaction with current minzu policies. As Baranovitch (2007) demonstrates, for Muslim Uyghur artists there is relatively more freedom of expression in the capital, Beijing, than in their home region of Xinjiang. There, performances of ethnic culture are carefully watched and expressions of Uyghur ethno-religious identity have become even more problematic since China gladly adopted the discourse of “war on terror” to fight real or perceived separatist threats in the region (Wayne, 2009). Nevertheless, even in this highly politicised case, the situation is arguably much better than it was during the Cultural Revolution, and an ethnic revival has taken place that spills over in transnational spaces, allowing new forms of expressing ethnic identity in new media (Harris, 2005; Vergani and Zuev, 2011). This transnationalisation may be seen as a challenge to the categorisation as Chinese citizen–sometimes openly contested in Xinjiang. But even in less politicised cases, such as the minorities of China’s southwest who straddle the borders with neighbouring countries, a new transnationalism is emerging that provides a basis for ethnic identification alongside that as Chinese citizen (Jonsson, 2000; Tapp, 2002). Although the rise in ethnic identity politics is not universal (Shih, 2001), it can be observed in many places in China. And some assertive minzu, such as the Yi–itself as a social category a creation of the ethnic classification campaign discussed above–have even taken on the Han on their most sacred terrain: Some Yi scholars challenge Han claims to cultural antiquity by positing even more ancient roots of their own culture. In contrast to Uyghur or Tibetan ethno-regionalism, which pose a direct threat to the state’s categorising them as Chinese citizens, the Yi claims have the opposite effect. Not only do they locate the Yi firmly within China, they also implicitly position the Yi as ancestors of the whole “Yellow race”, including the Han (Harrell and Li, 2003). Thus, the traditional Confucian view of seeing the Han as “elder brothers” that found its modern equivalent in the Han leading less-developed minzu toward socialism is cleverly turned on its head. So while ethnicity for some groups clashes with citizenship, for others it coexists with and is complemented by transnational ties, while still others use ethnicity to place themselves even more firmly inside the mainstream of Chinese society than the majority population.

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CONCLUSION This kind of intermeshing of social categories as discussed in the previous paragraph calls for more than just additive perspectives to understand how they interact. The perspective of “intersectionality” developed at the outset provides such an analytical lens because it allows for diverging outcomes of this interconnectivity. While additive perspectives highlight the double or triple exclusion of, for instance, ethnic minority female rural migrant workers in cities (Hom, 2010, 61), for others the same social categories (ethnicity, gender, class and citizenship) may play out quite differently. What about the minority scholar who benefitted from China’s preferential policies in education (not to mention birth-planning, if s/he has older siblings) to advance in the social hierarchy that places increasing value on educational credentials? As the reflections by two Yi Chinese ethnographers demonstrate (cf. Bamo, Harrell, and Ma, 2007), their position will also differ depending crucially on whether they are more rural or urban in their upbringing and living and whether their family used to be classified as “slave-owner” or “commoner”. And naturally, the social identity of the person or group in question will depend on situational and contingent factors as well. Thus, the intersecting of different social categorisations does not create something like a chessboard on which any given social actor could be placed with precision. Rather, it can be likened to a “matrix of meaning-making” (Dhamoon, 2011, 236-9) that is much more flexible. While the categorisations intersect and partially overlap, neither of these could be fully reduced to another one (Kipnis, 2008, 186). The discussion above mainly referred to the structural level of institutions and discourses to provide an overview of processes of social differentiation and identification, but also took account of such meaning-making. In particular, this chapter highlighted the tremendous role played by the Chinese party-state in its various guises in shaping these processes, but also showed that social actors are co-creators of social categorisations by awarding them certain meaning (cf. Hsu, 2007). This discussion could be used as a starting point to answering further queries on how social categorisations are created, maintained or challenged at the structural level, as well as questions regarding individual representation and identification. In a highly dynamic society such as contemporary China, such a perspective may provide the necessary flexibility to understand actors’ perspectives as well as the institutions and discourses shaping them. At a time when the Chinese Communist Party

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is purposely engaging in social engineering to strengthen a “Chinese middle class society” (Shen, 2003, 12), while society itself is undergoing a process of individualisation (Hansen and Svarverud, 2010), these questions are extremely relevant.

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SOCIAL CATEGORISATIONS IN THE TARASCAN STATE. DEBATES ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF ETHNICITY IN PREHISPANIC WEST MEXICO Sarah Albiez-Wieck

ABSTRACT The majority of the investigations about social categorisations and notably ethnicity focus on today’s ethnic groups. But particularly the latter topic becomes not only more interesting but also more difficult when ancient societies are under scrutiny. The question if ethnicity was a relevant categorisation and if ethnic groups existed in prehispanic Latin America, especially Mesoamerica, has been answered differently by scholars in recent debates. This article focuses on the situation in the prehispanic Tarascan state in West Mexico. In contrast to other authors, it will be argued that the role of ethnicity was at least much less important than other categorisations like social rank, kinship or lineage and the belonging to a ward, village or the subjection to a certain lord like the Tarascan “irecha”. It aims at reconstructing the prehispanic situation but also takes a look at the first decades after the Spanish conquest when important transformations in social categorisations took place.

INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIAL CATEGORISATIONS Interdependencies1 of social categorisations2 have been studied mainly in “modern capitalist bourgeois-patriarchal societies constituted as nation states as developed in the long 19th century” (Knapp, 2008, my translation). However, since according to Anthias (1998, 515) “social categorisation is an essential part of the classifying principles found in human societies”,3 we can start 1 I’m using interdependencies rather than intersectionality or articulation since it is a more open and flexible term. It refers to the complex interweaving of social categorisations, which is more than a simple causal dependence of one category from any other. 2 I prefer to use the term categorisation rather than category to express its procedural and alterable character. 3 Anthias follows the argumentation of Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. She adds: “Although there are no-uniform ways in which societies categorize, once individuals are placed into categories (although they are not mutually exclusive) across different dimensions, the relational

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from the assumption that some social categorisations must have existed in prehispanic times. In contemporary studies about intersectionality, social categorisations have often been separated into structural or macro-categories and categories on the micro- or agency-level.4 Most authors who approve this distinction agree that the structural categories are the triadic “race”/ethnicity5, class and gender6 while on the agency level categorisations on the agency level categorisations originate in social practice and thus there is a potentially endless number of them. Some of the more prominent mentioned by these authors, besides the already named triad which can also be used to denominate categorisations on this level, are sexuality, age, (dis)ability, religion and nationality (cf. Degele and Winker, 2007; Soiland, 2008; Klinger, 2008; Knapp, 2008; Hill Collins, 1989; Rommelspacher, 2006; Anthias, 2009). I regard structure and agency to be strongly interconnected and hardly separable and therefore consider this theoretical distinction as misleading. For my analysis I don’t differentiate between these two levels.7 Ethnicity is a social categorisation that has been the subject of heated debates over the last few decades and is doubtless a very important social categorisation in Latin America. There exists a vast literature along with numerous definitions and discussions on the topic. Following ideas by Weber (1922), Barth (1970) and Gabbert (2006, 90) and drawing from discussions in the Research Network for Latin America, ethnicity can be seen as a historically and socially constructed phenomenon that is articulated in cultural practices. Thereby, actors use several delimiting markers to carry out collective self- and external ascriptions, to distinguish themselves from a collective Other. An important reference point in the varying semantics of the ethnic is the belief in a common origin.

terms of otherness and sameness are constructed.[…] Usually the categories are constructed in a binary way and as mutually exclusive.” Anthias (1998, 515). 4 Degele and Winker add a representational level, which refers to cultural symbols (2007, 2). 5 I can’t discuss the often debated relationship between “race” and ethnicity here but I do want to stress that they denote closely related processes. 6 Degele and Winker add the category “body” (2007, 6). 7 Besides, I try to be aware of several problems inherent to social categorisations: On the one hand, many members of any given “categorisation” group do not see themselves as such and belong to multiple groups or have different layers of identities. On the other hand, categorisations can only reflect reality in a reductionist way, even may themselves construct reality (cf. Rommelspacher, 2006, 8; Soiland, 2008; Anthias, 1998, 507).

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Authors like Apitzsch (2009, 94) and Wimmer (2008) have convincingly linked the concept ethnicity to the concept of belonging8, speaking of ethnicity as a subjectively felt sense of belonging based on the belief in shared culture and common ancestry. This belief refers to cultural practices perceived as ‘typical’ for the community, to myths of a common historical origin, or to phenotypical similarities (Wimmer, 2008, 973-74).

However, as for social categorisations in general, ethnic groups are not fixed nor is ethnic identity inalterable. And, as Brubaker has pointed out, they are not “internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with common purposes” (Brubaker, 2009, 28). In the following I will argue that ethnicity was a) a far less important social categorisation in the Tarascan state than has generally been supposed; b) the social positioning of individuals in this society has been an interdependent process where other social categorisations played more important roles.

DIFFERENT OPINIONS ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHNICITY IN MESOAMERICA AND BEYOND Generally, when thinking about ethnic groups in Latin America today, there is a popular discourse, mostly among indigenous movements and NGO’s, that indigenous people subsist as ethnic groups in a more or less continuous way since the prehispanic period (cf. e.g. CONAIE, 2011; Declaración de la cumbre continental, 2005; Varias organizaciones indígenas colombianas, 2004). However, whether ethnic groups really existed in prehispanic Latin America and if ethnicity was a relevant categorisation within ancient societies has been answered differently by historians and archaeologists in recent debates. As to Mesoamerica, Gabbert states that for the pre-conquest Maya, “there was, apparently, no group consciousness that encompassed all masewalo’b [commoners] or almeheno’b [nobles]” and that “the pre-Conquest polities of Yucatán cannot be regarded as ethnic units” (Gabbert, 2004, 358

For a further discussion on the concept “belonging” see Anthias (2006); Yuval-Davis (2006); Pfaff-Czarnecka (2011).

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36). Social communities were constituted by the locality, the kinship or by political vassalage (Gabbert, 2006, 90-91; Gabbert, 2004, 35-36). This reminds us that especially in precolonial times, existent notions of belonging were more subtle and complicated than the Western idea of a clearly bounded socio-political unit. There was a net of differentiations and intersected and partially overlapping loyalties, as for example villages, clans, hunter associations, cult shrines and polities. In contrast to Gabbert’s hypothesis for the Maya, Sandstrom and Berdan state with relevance to central Mexico that “ethnic groups definitely existed” (Sandstrom and Berdan, 2008, 219). However, the authors also acknowledge that ethnicity wasn’t very relevant.9 It was neither a decisive factor in ordering peoples’ lives nor did it determine social and political decisions (Sandstrom and Berdan, 2008, 214; Berdan, 2008, 130-31). When opening the perspective beyond Mesoamerica, the analysis of the Moche on the Peruvian north coast by Quilter is interesting. He understands them not as state or ethnic group as most scholars, but primarily as a religious system. He believes that it is a fallacy to place “agency in institutions or generalize concepts of ethnic entities in the past” (Quilter, 2010, 233-34). Noack, who analyses the society of Trujillo, a city in the same region in Peru in the colonial period, doesn’t identify ethnicity as an important social categorisation in the colonial period; she states that “the only ‘ethnic’ group which has been found in this context are the supposedly ‘whites’ that formed the Trujillo society in the discourse of the 18th century: with one origin, one colour and an assumed common culture” (Noack, 2011, 52, my translation).10 Several authors who don’t focus their study on prehispanic societies or sometimes even not on Latin America at all, have actually stated that ethnicity is entirely modern, that it did not exist before the formation of nation states (cf. Müller and Zifonun, 2010, 28-29; Quilter, 2010; Klinger, 2008, 48-49), while others associate the emergence of ethnicity and/or “race” with

9

Instead, they stress the importance of corporate groups such as calpulli and teccalli, which were followed in significance by the altepetl (village or city state, Berdan, 2008, 19). For more detailed information about calpulli and teccalli, cf. Contreras, 1985, 91-92. 10 Besides, Noack considers the so-called “caste society” or sociedad de castas in colonial time as a mere discourse by the crown and her authorities in Hispanic America in the second half of the 17th century and criticises that the castas have often been conceived as “ethnic groups” (Noack, 2011, 37, 51).

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European colonialism (cf. Cornell and Hartmann, 2010, 88-89; Quijano, 2000; Thomson, 2007; Wimmer, 2010).11 As social categorisations before the existence of ethnicity, they point among others to kinship and regional origin (Cornell and Hartmann, 2010, 67) or religious unity.

SOCIAL CATEGORISATIONS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHNICITY IN THE TARASCAN STATE The Tarascan state in West Mexico was contemporary to the Aztec Empire in the Late Postclassic (c. 1200-1521 AD) and one of its most important rivals, which couldn’t be defeated by the central Mexican state. It occupied the region between the rivers Lerma and Balsas and with this most parts of the modern state of Michoacán and parts of the contemporary states of Guerrero, Guanajuato and Jalisco, and reached an expansion of 70,000-75,000 km2 (Michelet, 2001; Gorenstein and Perlstein Pollard, 1991, 169). At the moment of the Spanish conquest its capital was Tzintzuntzan. Nearly all authors who investigate the prehispanic Tarascan state are patently convinced that “ethnic” groups existed in the Tarascan state and implicitly argue that belonging to a certain “ethnic” group was meaningful; as for example, the Tarascans dominated other “ethnic” groups and assigned them special tasks like the protection of the eastern frontier and they had to pay different amounts of tribute (cf. e.g. Hernández Rivero, 1994; Silverstein, 2000; Herrejón Peredo, 1978; Cabrera, 1991). While formerly excessive tribute has been paid to the importance of the Tarascans as the principal group,12 in the last two decades, the Tarascan state has slowly but increasingly become recognised as “multiethnic” (cf. e.g. Perlstein Pollard, 1993; Perlstein Pollard, 2003; Perlstein Pollard, forthcoming; Martínez Baracs, 2003; Paredes Martínez, 2007; Paredes Martínez, 2011; Ochoa Serrano and 11 Cornell speaks of ethnicity, Quijano and Thomson of “race”. Thomson (2007, 74) is of the opinion that “many aspects of the ‘modern’ racial composition where already present or anticipated in colonial Latin America”, my translation. Wimmer is of the opinion, that ethnicity existed before the nation state, but that the nation state strengthened ethnic boundary making heavily. 12 One of the earliest scholars occupied with the Tarascans, Seler (1960) and also Kirchhoff (1956) always recognised that there existed other “ethnic” groups such as the Nahuas in the Tarascan state.

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Sánchez Díaz, 2003). The “ethnic” groups most often mentioned are the Tarascans, the Nahua, the Matlatzinca and Otomí (both speaking a language of the Otopame family) and the Chichimecs.13 Paredes Martínez and Roskamp have stated that “ethnic” groups like Nahuas or Matlatzincas lived in wards separated from the Tarascans, i.e. that there was a social division along ethnic lines (Paredes Martínez, 2006; Paredes Martínez, 2011; Roskamp, 1998; Roskamp, 2010). Generally, in the literature about the Tarascan state, there is barely a theoretical discussion of the concept of ethnicity and the implications of this fragmentation of the population into ethnic groups. However, while researching the external contacts of the Tarascan state (Albiez-Wieck, 2011), I noticed that it is very difficult to identify all these and several other “ethnic” groups mentioned in the literature and in the sources. In order to get to know more about social categorisations in the Tarascan state, I used written historical sources, archaeological data from publications and excavation reports as well as some linguistic data.

What historical and linguistic data reveal As there don’t exist any written pre-conquest sources,14 it is necessary to search for evidence about ethnicity in prehispanic times in post-conquest sources of the 16th century. A term frequently used in these sources to refer to a specific group is the term “nation” (nación), as for example the “Otomí nation” or the “Tarascan nation”. It is difficult to define the criteria employed by the authors to define the affiliation of certain individuals or groups to a certain “nation”. In some cases, the term nación is used as self-ascription. This is the case in a legal dispute in which some “natives” (naturales) from Maravatío demanded to be congregated in a separate village “por ser de nacion otomi distinta de la tarasca” (“for being from the Otomí nation dif-

13

The Tecos, which some authors consider to be a separate group, in my opinion can be associated with the Nahuas (Albiez-Wieck, 2011, chapter 6.3.1). Besides the mentioned linguistic groups, there probably existed a greater variety of languages in the Tarascan state. 14 The question if the Tarascans possessed a pictografical writing system similar to the Aztec is controversial. While authors like Williams (1992, 92) and Michelet (2001, 163) doubt it seriously, others like Roskamp (1998, 59; 2000, 241; 2003, 54) advocate it.

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ferent from the Tarascan” (AGN, 31 de enero de 1604, f. 77r). But in the majority of the cases the ascription to a “nation” is made by others: For example the naturales in Teticpac, close to Taxco, allude to the strangers in their town as “yndios de nación tarasca que dicen ser de Mechuacan” (“Indians from the Tarascan nation who say that they are from Michoacán”) (AGN, 1560, f. 171r). The same happens with the Spaniards, e.g. the authors of the Relaciones geográficas which inform their king to what nación the indigenous people living in their towns belonged. What complicates the understanding of indigenous self-ascriptions is that documents and declarations of the naturales are mostly filtered through the Spanish language and were mainly elaborated in official communication processes with the Spanish authorities to whose logics and structures they had to adapt, in order to achieve their objectives. Regarding the frequently employed term nación, it should be highlighted that its use in the 16th century was not the same as today and probably vacillated between a territorial and a “bloodline” meaning.15 Giudicelli has analysed the employment and criteria of classification for the term nación for the province New Biscay (Nueva Vizcaya) in colonial times. He concludes that in this region, the term nación was almost never applied following its original meaning–which, in his opinion, was the collectivity of the inhabitants of a kingdom or province–and that the classification criteria for the indigenous groups termed as naciones followed mostly the necessities of the classifying persons or institutions. The criteria employed by missionaries, for example, differed importantly from the criteria used by encomenderos. The language spoken by those classified seems to have been the most frequent criterion, especially among missionaries, but there are many exceptions. The belonging to a certain nación depended heavily on the belonging of its members to an encomienda and/or a missionary unit. He judges that nación was a 15 Thomson argues that “in colonial Latin America, for example, the term ‘nation’ could be applied to particular ethnic groups or to regional political groups [...], and also, more flexibly, to the generic category ‘Indians’. This superposition between ‘race’ and ‘nation’ supposes the descent and the common territorial origin of the Indians, in distinction from the Spaniards and the Blacks” (Thomson, 2007, 59, my translation). Noack is of the opinion that “nation” is one of the collective identities produced during the history of conquest and colonisation and that certain groups are denominated (by themselves and others) as “nations” is due to the fact that they are characterised by a specific political structure (Noack, personal communication, 2011).

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heteronymous category with utilitarian vocation, fundamentally aleatory in its attribution and instable in its destiny (Giudicelli, 2010, 152, 166-167). Let us examine the Tarascan terms. In the Diccionario grande we find the following translation for this concept: “nación de gentes [nation of people]. Masiruqua cuiripuecha” (Warren, 1991, 141, 319). In the 17 th century Botello Movellán translated it as “Marochan cuiripu” (Botello Movellán, 2003, 104), which literally simply means ‘some persons’ or ‘a group of persons’. Masiruqua cuiripuecha can be translated as ‘lineage of people’.16 ‘Nation’, then, can here be translated literally as lineage. Thus the term seems to be quite similar to the etymology of nación derived from the latin word natio, birth. Unfortunately we do not know if this meant that there existed a similar Tarascan concept behind it. However it is probable that an important unifying moment of a group of persons was the belief in a common descent. The importance of a common origin is reflected in the great relevance given to histories of migration and origin in the Relación de Michoacán and the Lienzo de Jicalán. Interestingly, both sources, one being a very important chronicle from the mid-16th century which tells the “official” history of the governing lineage of the Tarascan state (the uacúsecha) and the other one being a pictorial document recounting the origin of a Nahua-speaking group, retell the migration of the respective groups and both serve to legitimate domination and possession. Similar arguments alluding to a common migration history are put forward in other cases, such as in a litigation in Apaseo del Río, where Otomíes claimed that they arrived to the region prior to “the Tarascans” (AHCP, 16 de diciembre de 1560, f. 55)17. In the case of the town of Santa Ana Tetlaman, the inhabitants tell, in a document from 1577 AD, a story about their migration very similar to the one narrated in the Lienzo de Jicalán. They use it as an argument to claim the recognition of their town as independent cabecera (district town, cf. Carrasco, 1969). As to the Spanish authors, it can be noticed that the central criteria of classification apparently was the language, but they associated also certain 16 For the analysis I used the dictionaries by Warren (1991, 505) and Gilberti, et al. (1997, 147). 17 They claim: “We are native and first in the land which is ours and they entered it [illicitly]” (“nosotros somos naturales y primeros en la tierra la cual es nuestra y ellos se nos an [sic] entrado”).

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cultural elements with a certain linguistic group. Therefore, the author of the Relación de Necotlán tells that: These naturals, besides from their language Otomí, speak, trade and engage in the Tarascan language, and confess in it. They walk around dressed like Tarascans, with their doublets, shirts, hats, pants and blankets, and the ones who can, in the Spanish manner (Relación de Necotlán, 1987, 187).18

This means that the author was convinced that “the Tarascans” had a common attire which differentiated them from other groups in Michoacán, and he points at the case of the Otomíes in Necotlán which behave differently as an exception. However, this statement is somehow contradictory to one given in the Relación de Sirándaro, which, talking about Matlatzincas and Tarascans, states that: “besides language, they don’t differ in anything, because in habits and service and doctrine they don’t differ in anything”19 (Relación de Sirándaro, 1987, 268-269). It is perceivable in the Spanish sources that generally the affiliation to a linguistic group was the affiliation easiest to be identified. This means it is not made explicit if a classification beyond the language was intended, or if even something like a group consciousness existed.20 However, it is striking how easily people were classified as “Tarascans”, “Otomí” and “Matlatzincas” in the whole region not only in the Relaciones geográficas but also in legal cases and chronicles like the Relación breve y verdadera (1966, orig. 1873). Unfortunately we will probably never know with certainty which criteria were used to define the belonging to a group of this kind in the prehispanic period. It is remarkable that many examples are either linked to land or other conflicts over ownership or, alternatively, many mentioned groups claim that they had migrated to the place in question. These are both motives that have been identified as stimulating ethnogenesis nowadays. Nevertheless, the 18 “Estos naturales, demás de su lengua otomí, hablan, tratan y contratan en la lengua tarasca, y se confiesan en ella. Andan vestidos como los tarascos, con sus jubones, camisas, sombreros, zaragüelles y mantas, y los que tienen posible, al modo español.” My translation. 19 “si no es en la lengua, en ninguna cosa [se] diferencian, porque, en el hábito y servicio y doctrina, en ninguna cosa [se] diferencian”. 20 Generally, it has to be noted, that language groups are not necessarily equivalent to ethnic groups and that many people in the Tarascan state (and in Mesoamerica in general) were multilingual.

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examples mentioned above only show group solidarity on a local level. Authors like Gabbert have argued that it is only possible to speak of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 2005)21, i.e. in this case ethnic groups, if they are larger than face-to-face groups (Gabbert, 2004, xiii). Another small indicator for the possible existence of ethnic boundarymaking is the hint for xenophobia in the usage of the word xarucha which according to Roskamp designated other ethnies or linguistic groups in a disrespectful manner and which is translated as barbarian or bozal22 (Roskamp, 1998, 48). However, Castro Gutiérrez has tried to show, with the help of the example of riots and petitions among the inhabitants of Tzintzuntzan in the 16th century, that anything like an “ethnic solidarity” didn’t exist and that “the space of collective identity didn’t transcend the district town (cabecera) and its subjects” (Castro Gutiérrez, 2003, 294; my translation). It has to be stressed that it is perceivable in the sources, that in the prehispanic and early colonial period, the question of social rank was very important, i.e. if one belonged to the dominant social group or to the dominated; the distinctions the Spaniards drew among nobles and commoners. In Tarascan, there existed the term p’urhépecha23 as equivalent to the Nahua term macehual or the Spanish term gente común for the commoners, and the term achaecha for the nobles, or pipiltin, how they were called in Nahuatl. A noble lineage normally believed in a common origin, from where it had migrated to its latter place of settlement; an example for this is the already mentioned migration of the uacúsecha-lineage as narrated in the Relación de Michoacán. While the commoners had to pay tribute, the nobles were exempted from

21 Anderson speaks about nations, not about ethnic groups, but maybe the term can also be applied to other kinds of identities than the modern “nation” state from the 19th century onward. 22 Bozal, besides its meaning as barbarian, could also refer to speaking an unintelligible language. African slaves were often designated as bozales in the colonial period when they still did not speak Spanish. 23 Cf. Gilberti, 2004, 154. The current ethnie living in Michoacán self-designates as P’urhépecha. There exists a heated discussion what term did the habitants of the Tarascan state used to self-designate before the conquest. I think that there are quite clear indicators for the usage of the term p’urhépecha as solely denominating one social stratum. However, the term Tarascan is problematic, too. For more details cf. Albiez-Wieck (2011, 4-6) and Márquez Joaquín (2007).

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this obligation. Instead, they had the duty to execute government. Nobles also had the right to possess and use prestigious goods such as greenstone, which according to López-Austin who analysed the case of the Aztecs, differentiated the nobles physically from the commoners by invigorating their “souls” (López Austin, 2004, 452-55). As Paredes Martínez has shown for the case of the Matlatzinca in the Charo region, the social status of a person or family was decisive also for the place of settlement. The Matlatzincans, supposedly relocated by the Tarascan irecha (“king”), were allocated in different places according to their “degree of nobility” (Paredes Martínez, 2006, 9). This seems to show that there existed an interrelation between the belonging to the language group of the Matlatzincans or to the migrating group of these Matlatzincans who came from Aztec territory which lead them to settle together in the same region and the belonging to a social stratum, which divided them inside the region. Apparently, for good living conditions social rank was more important than the belonging to a language or maybe “ethnic” group. Nobles from different language groups and political units interrelated through (commercial and gift) exchange of prestige goods and intermarriage. The latter is evidenced in the various marriages of the hero Tariácuri in the Relación de Michoacán and the genealogy of the noble lineage of Tzintzuntzan which had Tarascan and Nahua speaking members (cf. Albiez-Wieck, 2011, 102-10; Castro Gutiérrez, 2009). With the Spanish conquest, many nobles, at least in the first decades, managed that their rights were recognised and thus they continued belonging to the dominant group; some going through a process of intense acculturation. But the first decades of colonial rule also permitted a lot of social mobility and passing from one social rank to another–in both directions. According to some authors, in Michoacán a process of “macehualización” took place, i.e. many nobles lost their privileged status after the conquest (cf. Martínez Baracs, 1997, 110; Paredes Martínez, 2008, 105-06). Paredes Martínez mentions also that there arose a great number of conflicts because indigenous nobles tried to force other nobles to work for them (Paredes Martínez, 1997, 190), which shows the important structural changes that took place. It is necessary to take this social internal differentiation into account, because, as Gabbert rightly points out, “ethnic” conflicts are often “not the result of contradictions between different population groups as such, but of

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strategies of certain sectors within these groups to further their particular interests” (Gabbert, 2004, xiii); and as Sandstrom and Berdan observe for prehispanic central Mexico “actual historical events, whether wars, rebellions, or lesser conflicts, probably did not line up along ethnic lines” (Sandstrom and Berdan, 2008, 219). What is more, the conquests of adjacent regions and groups were products of elite decisions, since they received the benefits in case of a successful conquest: more tribute. It is possible, but not well investigated, that different noble lineages from different language groups in the Tarascan state felt more group consciousness among them, than with commoners in their same towns speaking their same language. However it is unclear how far these ties reached, especially when crossing the border to other political entities, e.g. the Aztec state. According to Gabbert, there did not exist a clear correlation among “one language–one culture–one people”, what he has called the “unholy trinity” (Gabbert, 2006, 92). However, I consider that in some cases a common language could generate a group consciousness if it coincided with other identifying elements such as the affiliation to a political entity or the belief in a common origin, without this being an automatic relationship. This seems to have been the case in the litigation in Maravatío mentioned above. It is also possible that speakers of a common language shared cultural elements such as religion and therefore constituted more than a simple language group but without this leading necessarily to group consciousness. Besides, in Tarascan towns and cities, linguistic groups seem to have lived in separated wards. This suggests that the affiliation to a linguistic group did lead to group formations. Those linguistic groups, although they did not necessarily differ from others in their material culture, might still have felt a sense of otherness and lead to visible social demarcations. The analysis of the tribute codices of Cutzio and Huétamo in the Balsas region done by Roskamp (2003) has shown that the speakers of different languages were habitants of different wards in one town (in this case Cutzio and Huétamo) and had to pay different amounts of tribute. The two groups are classified as Otomíes and Tarascans in the codices, while in other sources the habitants of the town are classified as Matlatzincans and Tarascans. Not only was the amount of tribute different according to the codices, but also the caciques (local chiefs) of the two groups had possibly a different status, ranging the Tarascan over the Otomí (cf. Roskamp, 2003, 48-98). It is unclear if these distinctions were already made in the prehispanic period, but since the

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mid-16th century codices are drawn in a clearly prehispanic style, this is quite probable, especially considering the traditional style of the codices. In this case it would be an indicator for the existence of a group classification on a supralocal level and by external ascription, since the central government of the Tarascan state determined the amounts of tribute and could have classified the two groups differently. There seems to be a connection between socio-economic categories and language groups, which could be a small hint to the possible existence of ethnic grouping. However, it is also possible that the central government, i.e. the uacúsecha nobles in charge, were only favouring a local chief and his subjects because he was a member of their noble lineage, although I think the former one is more probable. If it were true, it would be possible to apply the argument by Brubaker about the “groupmaking power of the state” which through “naming, counting and classifying” transforms the “self-understandings, social organisation, and political claims of the populations […] especially when they are linked through public policy to tangible benefits” (Brubaker, 2009, 33); in this case the tangible benefits would be expressed in reductions in tribute payment.24 As we can see then, interdependencies are quite visible in the tribute system. An Otomí-speaking person living at the frontier, for example, had to pay different tribute than an Otomí-speaking person living in the core region; an Otomí-speaking cacique from the Balsas region might have had closer ties to the irecha than a Tarascan-speaking commoner living in Tzintzuntzan. Beside social categorisations such as rank, village/regional origin and maybe language, there existed other social categorisations in the Tarascan state which also shaped the life of the inhabitants of Michoacán, such as occupational groups, age and gender which cannot be extensively discussed here. An example for the interdependencies of gender with rank, language and occupational groups would be that a noble Nahua woman in Tzintzuntzan had nearly the same life as a noble Tarascan woman in Tzintzuntzan but a completely different one from a commoner Nahua woman; but all of them had in common that they had different occupations than men.

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This argument can obviously also be put forward to explain the situation in the colonial period referring to the Spanish government.

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Does archaeology help to clarify the problem? Since from the historical data it is very difficult to know if the mentioned language groups had any group consciousness, I hoped to find a more precise identification of these groups in archaeological data. Emberling has stated that “archaeologists can identify ethnicity in cases in which ethnicity was a salient social identity” mostly by “studies of redundantly marked social boundaries” (Emberling, 1997, 324-25). He argues that ethnicity can be marked by any aspect of material culture and thinks that aspects of ritual practice, household structure and cuisine might be especially relevant. He states that if several aspects of material culture all stop at a certain boundary, this is strong evidence of an ethnic boundary. But this also implies that ethnicity can only be detected if it was an important social identity. Although in the meantime the “one-to-one correspondence of an archaeological assemblage with an ethnic or cultural group was already being undermined” (Quilter, 2010, 228-29), still many archaeologists ascribe certain aspects of material culture to certain “ethnic” groups. This has been mostly done for the Tarascans, identifying lists of supposedly Tarascan types of artefacts and other aspects of material culture. The two most influential lists of supposedly Tarascan characteristics are the ones by Rubín de la Borbolla and Perlstein Pollard. Defining exclusively Tarascan traits, they both mention the yácatas,25 buildings in form of a keyhole, and polychrome ceramic in characteristic forms such as stirrup spout vessels and mostly decorated with negative painting. Besides they both mention the use of ceramic pipes and fine lapidary work such as the earrings and labrets in jade, obsidian and rock cristal. Perlstein Pollard adds certain cotton cloths and Borbolla enumerates furthermore stone sculptures, especially in form of the so-called Chac mools, metal jewellery and post-burial cremation and primary and secondary burials without stone tombs (Rubín de la Borbolla, 1948, 30-31; Perlstein Pollard, 1994, 212-213). Most archaeologists have stuck to this list explicit- or implicitly (cf. e.g. Cárdenas García, 1996, 29; Schöndube, 1994, 331; Schöndube, 1996, 17). 25 The German scholar Seler, already in the beginning of the 20th century, made emphasis in the buildings called yácatas, which were in his opinion different from pyramids in other Mesoamerican regions because of their long extension conforming a line of three or four annexed buildings which are aligned in a north-south direction. (Seler, 1960, 127).

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However, I share the opinion of Pulido Méndez who has postulated that it is not possible to identify unequivocally something as material vestiges of the Tarascan “ethnie” because in the Tarascan social group there were many different material manifestations of one culture. According to him, most of Borbollas distinctions are useless to identify anything as Tarascan or as tarasco-uacúsecha26; best example are probably the Chac mools which were present also among the Toltec, Aztecs and in the Maya area. Even the smoke pipe was widely distributed in areas northwest of the Tarascan state. Other evidence is drawn from metallurgy, use of jade, obsidian and crystal, or burial forms–all do occur outside the Tarascan domain, too. He showed that most of the mentioned characteristics are not exclusively or unequivocally Tarascan (Pulido Méndez, 2006, 90). However, Pulido Méndez argues that there do exist two characteristics which may help to define the Tarascan–but only their elite, which he calls tarasco-uacúsecha to differentiate it from the Tarascans “ethnic” group in general: the yácata-architecture and the ceramic. However, he underlines that in the territory of the Tarascan state, there have been found very few y´acatas. They were always occupying a privileged position in the settlements and were directly associated to tarasco-uacúsecha ceramic. There exist several types of this elite ceramic (Pulido Méndez, 2006, 122-124, 143, 186-189). I think that it is possible to add to yácatas and the ceramic style, certain metal artefacts, especially spiral tweezers, which are shown as ornaments worn by the high priest in the Relación de Michoacán. However they are all only indicators and not proofs of Tarascan presence, since especially metal artefacts and ceramics could be also object of trade with other groups or could be imitated by other groups for prestige reasons. And, what is most important, as mentioned above, they only point to the presence of the Tarascan elite, and not to the presence of the Tarascans as “ethnic” group. Besides, these indicators of Tarascan elite are not found in all sites where Tarascan elites were supposed to be living according to historical sources (Albiez-Wieck, 2011, chap. 6.2). As already mentioned, in the excavated sites, especially the yácatas were quite rare, and also spiral tweezers are extremely reduced in numbers. As to the other linguistic groups which lived in the Tarascan state, I have not been able to find any indication to a distinct material culture different 26

Uacúsecha is Tarascan for “eagles” and was the self-denomination of the governing noble line in the prehispanic Tarascan state.

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from the other groups in the excavation reports and published archaeological data. The only possible exception I am aware of in the excavated sites is the case of a ward in Tzintzuntzan, today known as Ojo de Agua, where Perlstein Pollard identified a small group of persons of supposedly “non-Tarascan filiation”. Only there did she find a ware called Querenda, which in her opinion is quite similar to the ceramic found in the Tarascan-Aztec frontier and also to the Querenda ware in Urichu where it can be probably dated to the Early Postclassic period (approx. 900-1200 AD). However, although she believes the presence of these ceramic points to the presence of Otopame groups in Tzintzuntzan (cf. Perlstein Pollard and Vogel, 1994, 42, 170), it is totally unclear what its accurate explanation is, as it could for example also indicate the presence of “Chichimecs” in Tzintzuntzan or Tarascan groups which had a connection to the border region. In sum, it has been impossible to identify clearly distinct “ethnic” groups in the Tarascan state using archaeological data–at least with the available data of the already excavated sites. But even if this was possible, it is important to always bear in mind that cultural boundaries are not necessarily coincident with the boundaries of ethnic groups. Especially boundaries in material culture, which are for example supposedly identifiable in the Aztec-Tarascan border27, could simply be indicating political boundaries or the boundaries of a distribution system. In the case of the Aztec-Tarascan border, Otopame groups, which were understood as an ethnic group later on, lived definitely on both sides of the border. And last but not least, archaeological data can’t inform us about ascriptions people made.

CONCLUSION When analysing interdependencies of social categorisations in the Tarascan state, we notice that we have few sources which help us comprehend the mindsets and concepts of the people living then; and the available data from history, linguistics and archaeology are often contradictory, and all have their own restrictions. While linguistic data present the problem that ethnicity

27

This has been stated by Perlstein Pollard (2000, 76), Gorenstein (1985, 5) and Hernández Rivero (1994, 60, 167).

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and language often do not coincide, historical sources often present external ascriptions and are distorted by the “Spanish lense” as they were elaborated to fit the needs of the colonial system. Archaeological data are probably the less useful to identify collective identities such as ethnicity; while they can be helpful to identify different ranks. Besides, the existence of ethnic groups is widely taken for granted in the historical and archaeological literature and this problem has barely been investigated for the case of the Tarascan state. Therefore, through my analysis I have shown that it is hardly possible to identify the existence of ethnicity in the prehispanic Tarascan state. In the prehispanic Tarascan state, affiliation to a social rank such as the nobles, the belonging to a town or ward, gender and occupational groups seemed to be much more important than the belonging to “ethnic” groups for whose existence evidence is sparse. These different social categorisations interacted in a complex manner, which is not yet fully understood. It is necessary to stress that the different kinds of social categorisations were alterable, and especially in the context of the conquest, there were many changes in the constitution of groups or groupings. The Spanish conquerors brought their own classification system with them and applied it to the societies they found. It seems that they used mainly language, legal and socioeconomic criteria (like occupation) to classify people in the former Tarascan state. It is not so easy to investigate social categorisations or their interdependencies because the theoretical and methodological framework which has been developed for this complex is based mainly on current societies, using methods like interviews which are not applicable to the prehispanic situation (Degele and Winker, 2007). There is still much work to be done–also investigating the different social categorisations in themselves.

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THINKING INTERDEPENDENCIES. DECOLONIAL FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON LABOUR AND MIGRATION

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

ABSTRACT During the General Strike in Madrid in 2003, Precarias a la Deriva (2004) noticed that the dismantling of job security was debated but precariousness and particularly women’s precarious lives were not on the agenda. Now, nine years later precariousness is at the heart of Spain’s economy. As the Spanish 15th May Movement of the indignados (the outraged) signalled, unemployment, underemployment and poorly paid jobs have become the norm. While precariousness holds the spectre of the contemporary economic crisis haunting the Occident, feminisation has become its robe. This paper takes Precarias’ argument forward by discussing unpaid and paid domestic work as the neuralgic point of the feminisation of labour. However, it argues for a complication of this analysis by attending to a decolonial perspective that takes into account the cultural predication of the labour force within the epistemological contours of what the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano defines as the “coloniality of power”.

INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL INEQUALITIES–LOCAL ARTICULATIONS In December 2011, Time magazine named “The Protester” the Person of the Year. 2011 has been the year of protest, as Time writes “protesters not only voice their complaints, they change the world”.1 Time alludes here to the changes brought about by the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, the protest on Greek streets, the Chilean and Puerto Rican student strikes, the Spanish movement of the 15th of May of the indignados, the Movement Against Violence in Mexico and the 99% movement in the USA. These forms of social protest articulate a collective indignation regarding a reckless logic of capital accumulation and a corrupt system of political representation. The multitude in Sol2 shouted: “No nos representan” (“They do not represent us!”) 1 2

Cf. Time, 14.12.2011. Puerta del Sol is the main square in Madrid.

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clearly stating their feelings to politicians of not being represented by them and claiming “Real Democracia Ya” (Real Democracy Now). The sensation of sharing a common feeling of indignation drove the force of change in Spain. While the movement insisted on collective claims, some claims seemed to be more easily shared than others. For example, when the queer-feminist assembly raised a banner with the slogan “La revolución será feminista o no será” (The revolution will be feminist or it won’t be) some irritations were caused. This intervention was perceived by some as an attempt to split the indignados movement, but as the queer-feminist assembly argued in their statement, the question of feminism is not over.3 “Who is in charge of caring when we are here?” Or “Who are the alleged speakers of the movement?” they asked the assembly. With these questions the queer-feminist assembly brought back the question of care and the continuing feminisation of labour into the movement’s agenda. The questions of who speaks and who participates within the movement do not only bring the question of gender inequality to the fore, but also those of migration and the “colour line”. Sitting in the square in Sol, raising my arms in the air in agreement, I thought of the participation of migrants in the movement. Meanwhile, migrant groups were organising the assembly on “legalisation”, voicing their plight and asking for an end to illegalisation. Both articulations voiced by the queer-feminist assembly, on the one hand, and the migrants’ rights assembly on the other, stress the need for rethinking feminisation in relation to coloniality in the context of Western Europe. Using domestic work and undocumented migration as synecdoches, the first for feminisation, and the second for the prevalence of coloniality in Europe, I will discuss here the need for an intersectional, decolonial feminist analysis of precarity in Western Europe. I will do so by, first following Precarias a la Deriva’s analysis of the feminised circuits of precarity, second taking a close look at migration policies in Western Europe today and third relating them to the phenomenon of undocumented migrant women employed as domestic workers in private households in Europe. Grounding the analysis of feminisation of labour and precarity within this example and in dialogue with decolonial feminist voices, this essay will argue for a decolo3

Cf. Grupo de Trabajo de Género y Sexualidad: “En Sol estamos por lo de todos”, http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/En-Sol-estamos-por-lo-de-todos.html (accessed 03.06. 2011)

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nial feminist analysis of feminisation. But first, let us take a look at two vectors of precarity in Western Europe: feminisation and the migration regime.

VECTORS OF PRECARITY Feminisation Despite a longstanding feminist struggle for gender equality, in the 21st century Western Europe continues to reproduce an old gendered script. The questions of “Who does the caring?” or “Who is organising or doing the housework?” have not disappeared from any kitchen table. Such work is still widely considered in society as the terrain of femininity. Very little has changed in the gendered division of work. Though feminist campaigns on gender equality and “work-life balance” seem to have reached national social policies and are incorporated in some EU directives on gender mainstreaming, fundamental inequalities between the genders prevail. The wage gap between men and women in the EU is steady at 15% and the gender specific segregation in the labour market stagnates.4 Although women’s access to the labour market has increased in the last decades by achieving a total of 57.2% employment in comparison to men’s 70.9%, qualitative progress remains problematic.5 Fur-

4 In the Nordic and Baltic countries the gender gap was 7 percentage points or less in 2009, while in Malta, Italy and Greece the difference was more than 20 percentage points (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Labour_market_participa tion_by_sex_and_age). The gender gap is particularly significant in leading positions, for example, the proportion of company directors who are women is stagnating at 33% and in politics 23% of national Members of Parliament (MPs) and 33% of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are women. EU Report on equality between women and men, 2008, http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/cha/c10167.htm (accessed 16th June 2011) 5 Ibid. EU Report on equality between women and men, 2008, http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/cha/c10167.htm. Though the current economic crisis has affected men’s inactivity rate, which rose in 2009 among men aged 25-64 to 0.2 percentage points, women’s inactivity rate despite a downward trend remains higher. Between 2000 and 2009 the share of women outside the labour market fell from 39.9% to 35.7%, while the share of men outside the labour force remained almost stable, falling slightly from 22.8% in 2000 to 22.2% in 2009 (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa. eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Labour_market_participation_by_sex_and_age, accessed 16.06.2011).

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ther, women comprise the biggest share of the “inactivity” figures. This is even the case considering the effects of the crisis on men, expressed in an increase in inactivity rate. In the last ten years women’s inactivity rate fell from 39.9% to 35.6%, while men’s inactivity rate fell slightly from 22.9% to 22.4% in 2010. The highest share of inactivity in women occurs between the ages of 25 and 54 years. In 2010, 8.3% of men in this age group were “inactive”, whereas women accounted for 21.9%; half of them (10.1%) indicated personal and family reasons for inactivity, with most women having children under the age of six.6 The term “inactive” reveals an ideological view that still perceives women’s reproductive labour as non-productive and therefore, as feminist economists note, it is not considered in the overall calculation of the GNP (Folbre, 1994). This is remarkable if we realise that three-quarters of all women are working part-time (76.5%) and that women are overrepresented in temporary work, spending a significant amount of their productive time in raising children, caring for other family members and home making.7 Further, these figures focused on declared work, silencing not only reproductive labour, but also the increasing precarity in the labour market, characterised by an extension of “undeclared” and “informal” work. Evolving away from state control this work escapes not only taxation, but also the fundamental corporate workers’ rights and entitlements to social benefits, unemployment and health insurance (Williams, 2011; Pfau-Effinger, 2009). These different modes of employment, part-time, temporary, undeclared and informal, are characteristic of precarious work. Expanding to all the sectors of the labour market in the last decade, precariousness is increasingly shaping the organisation of labour in Western Europe. It is this tendency that the Madrid group Precarias a la Deriva discusses through their militant research on feminised circuits of precarity in 2004. In reference to Antonio Negri (1999; 2003), Hardt and Negri (2000) and Maurizio Lazzarato’s (1996; 2002) analysis of the biopolitical quality of labour and the immaterial character of capital production, Precarias’ analysis stresses the role of care through the Spanish term “trabajo de cuidados”. As they assert, the faculty of “caring” has become a highly demanded resource in the new organi-

6 7

Ibid. Cf. footnote 6.

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sation of labour. Subjective faculties such as attention, friendliness, communication and empathy have become valuable personal features of the workforce supporting consumption and production strategies. Epitomising the incorporation of subjectivity into the production process, the role of “care” as spoken about by Precarias (2004) and, in particular, Cristina Vega Solís (2009), denotes the persistence of the gendered division of work and the devaluation of women’s work. Thus, while the activity of “caring” has become a valuable productive resource, it is not explicitly declared as a requirement, nor is this recognised as a specific skill that should be remunerated. Yet, it flows into the production process, contributing to the creation of surplus value through its absorption as affective value as I argue elsewhere (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010). Following Precarias and Vega Solís, I consider that the absorption of “care” epitomises the new biopolitical quality of labour in contemporary capitalism. As Antonio Negri suggests, this means, “the intertwining of power and life. The fact that power has chosen to place its imprint upon life itself, to make life its privileged surface of inscription […]” (2003, 64). Attached to the qualities attributed to feminised labour, the inclusion of the faculty of “care” into the circuits of capital production, signals the persistent logic of feminisation. Arguably, feminisation not only denotes the classical terrain of women’s work, for example domestic, personal care, personal services and clerical work, but it encompasses the expansion of specific employment relations and conditions socially attributed to women’s work. Precarias demonstrate in their drifts through women’s working lives, how the educational, clerical and private personal service sectors are characterised by precarious working condition and strategies of devaluation of women’s work. As the women interviewed in Precarias’ documentary A La Deriva state, they are subjected to fixed-term contracts, poorly paid hourly jobs and spontaneous dismissal practices, facilitated by the dismantling of unionised workers’ agreements and also motivated by age, “race” and bodyism (appearance) discrimination. While Precarias focus on women’s experiences, their observations are relevant for the increasing precariousness in the labour market as a whole. Connecting to a wider debate in feminist theory,8 Precarias agree with Annie Phizacklea and Carol Wolkowitz’s observation that feminisation comprises “declining terms and conditions of employment, so that a

8

Cf. for example, Benería, 2003; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Sassen, 2002.

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large proportion of the labour force has come to experience “feminised” (that is, poor and insecure) conditions of work in some cases through deregulation at the national level” (1995, 3). The cheapening and precarisation of the workforce, thus, is a common feature for flexible reproduction and the expansion of neo-liberal strategies of capital accumulation. The subjective potential assigned to the condition of femininity–its attributed caring and altruistic character–become desirable faculties in this re-organisation of labour. Consequently, feminisation does not just refer to women’s work and the increasing participation of women in paid work, but to a general mode of production (Fantone, 2007; Corsani, 2007; Ongaro, 2003; Revel, 2003). As such as Tiziana Vettor from the Milan group S/Convegno asserts, feminisation entails, [t]he presence of more women in every sector of the labour market and having all types of contracts (not only insecure jobs); and that in work today, in the socalled post-Fordist era, female attitudes have been shaped by production, in which–according to Deleuze–there are traces of the symbolic and female as a corporeal entity. The expectations, desires and presence of women have indeed been one of the main reasons for the transformation in types of production in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (S/Convegno, 2007, 105).

Thus, following S/Convegno, the feminisation of labour is no longer just attached to women’s reproductive labour but has become a common tendency in the organisation of labour. This means that capital increasingly relies on the emotional, affective and relational potential of the labour force. Thus, the divide between reproductive and productive labour, addressed by feminist Marxist theory in the 1970s and 1980s (cf. for example, Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Hartmann, 1979; Himmelweit, 1995) has become more fluid (Precarias, 2004). In contrast to previous feminist debates, Precarias abandon the classical Marxist analysis of reproduction and production by conceiving “care” (trabajo de cuidados) as a hybrid category, demarcating the continuum of production and reproduction. This sets the imprints of capital in life itself, so that capital benefits not only from the direct exploitation of the labour force, but also from the ways we organise our lives: our relational, communicative, emotional and creative potential. It is this last aspect that Precarias develop in their attempt to understand precarity not just as an oppressive force, but also as a productive one that disperses and interrupts the order of

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capital. The fleeting potential inscribed in precarity–its potential to escape from the norms of the organisation of capital–inspired the Precarity Movement in Europe in the last decade (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008). Yet, while recognising the ambiguous character of precarity, as indicative of poor living conditions, on the one hand, and its liberating potential, on the other; a different story needs to be considered, when we contrast this exploration of precarity and feminisation with Anibal Quijano’s (2000a/b; 2008) analysis of the “coloniality of power”. While precarity might be new to the citizens of societies settled on the firm pillars of the welfare state like Germany, the UK and France, it is not new to the population subjected to migration policies in these countries or to European Mediterranean societies and it is a common feature in postcolonial economies. Though the debates on “coloniality” are rooted in the struggles for liberation of the indigenous movements in Latin America and not easily transferable to the academic context of European or North American universities (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010), they are analytically valuable for understanding how processes of “inferiorisation” and “subalternisation” take place within Europe itself. This becomes significant when we address the link between migration and coloniality.

Migration and coloniality The number of Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek people migrating anew to economically more stable countries like Germany, the UK, New Zealand or Australia or relatively prosperous economies like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina raises questions about the challenges the economic crisis in Europe and the United States pose to migration patterns. Despite this development, migration regulations in Western Europe are governed by a logic that I would like to discuss here in reference to Quijano’s “coloniality of power” and Walter Mignolo’s (2000; 2002) concept of “colonial difference.” For example, the labelling of these new migrants as professionals differentiates these new European labour migrants from the labour migration of the 1960s from Southern Europe to economically prosperous countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Benelux countries (Robledo, 2011). It also sets up a division between Western European migration, constructed in the media through the image of the highly skilled worker, and non-European or

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Eastern European migration, still being portrayed in the same mainstream media as “low skilled migrants” representing a “burden” for European societies. This latter endures the restrictions imposed through the incessant production of more and more sophisticated measures and instruments to control and prevent migration. This is a scenario to which new European migrants seem not to be subjected.9 Their skills are highly demanded and therefore jobs seem to be within their immediate reach. Often they encounter former migrant networks in place, for example the Greek-Australian community, which was reported as receiving the new Greek migrants and supporting them in making a home in Australia (Pidd, 2011; Hooper, 2011; Phillips, 2011; Phillips, et al., 2011). On the other side of the Atlantic, the welcome that non-European, postcolonial migrants and refugees receive in Europe is rather frosty. Not only do they need to apply for a tourist or residency visa that might enable them to enter Europe, but also the granting and extension of these visas depend on various factors such as evidence of a work contract or university place.10 As these visa requirements are subject to state policies and economic demands, migration recruitment and entry policies are affected by economic and political conjunctures. For example, in 2011 the UK’s Conservative government proposed a reduction in the number of student visas, skilled workers, settlement routes and family reunification policies for non-EU migrants.11 These

9 The Federal Statistical Office of Germany announced an immigration record in the first half of 2011. 435,000 people settled in Germany in the first half of 2011 (19% more than in the corresponding period of 2010). 381,000 of them were Europeans. The migration of EU citizens has increased by 29%. The largest increase in immigration comes from EU countries affected by the economic crisis. The number of new immigrants from Greece increased by 84% during the first half of 2011 (4,100 people), while migration from Spain grew by 49% (2,400 people). Moreover, besides Germany, Greeks are looking for better luck in Australia. As reported by The Guardian, 2,500 Greek citizens went to Australia in 2011 while 40,000 more have expressed similar interest (Pidd, 2011; Phillips, et al., 2011; Phillips, 2011; Hooper, 2011). 10 Due to the different agreements between states in regard to the equivalence of academic and professional degrees, some migrants are confronted with a national system that does not validate their degrees. Their professional and academic experiences are so not fully recognised, affecting the possibility of obtaining employment in their professional field. Instead, they experienced a form of “deskilling”. 11 Cf. BBC: David Cameron’s immigration speech (14. April 2011). http://www.bbc.co. uk/news/uk-politics-1308378 (accessed 02. February 2012).

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policies conceive human beings in utilitarian ways targeting them as profitable resource or “social risk” that need to be controlled and managed. Both perspectives, one on economic growth and the other on national security, divert us from the fact that we are dealing with human beings and their right to a dignified life, family, work and education. For non-EU migrants to obtain a tourist visa or residency permit for a spouse, child or parents is becoming increasingly difficult. As well as this, EU citizens marrying non-EU citizens not residing in the EU are subjected to the suspicion that theirs might be a marriage of convenience. For example the introduction of English tests for non-European spouses joining their partner in the UK in 2011 (Travis, 2011) or the restriction imposed on family reunification (Kofman, 2011). The circumscription of human lives through migration rhetoric and policies has detrimental effects on individual trajectories. The creation of a hierarchical system of residency status produces differential citizenship regulated by exclusion. Thus, while citizens are entitled to privacy as long as there is no threat or evidence of harm towards any family member or other person, migrants’ families are subjected to migration policies, regulating their right to family reunification. It is through this logic that an exception to the status of citizen is instituted, evoking the need for an analysis of this system of social classification in terms of Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of power”. Quijano analyses the racial system of social classification instated by Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers in Latin America in the 16th century. The indigenous and Afro-descendent populations were excluded from fundamental human rights and reduced to a mere exploited labour force. While this is set in a specific historical and socio-political context, it is what inspires the analysis here. While engaging with the material conditions established through colonial domination, the “coloniality of power” insists on the epistemic framework imposed by the colonisers. As Kelvin Santiago-Valles points out, this perspective entails an analysis of “world capitalism’s institutions, patterns, or forms of power (namely, the nation-state, the bourgeois family, and the enterprise)” (2003, 47) in order to understand how relations of authority, gender and labour are organised in society. Drawing attention to how this framework is supported by a pattern of thinking presupposing “race” as the basis for social classification, Quijano foregrounds how a normative value system is established through this principle. The power of coloniality is articulated in a pattern of thinking establishing a value system based on

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racial differentiation and hierarchies. While altered through different historical and political events, this colonial view still prescribes the occidental perception of the world. As Quijano notes “the structure of power was and even now continues to be organised on and around the colonial axis,” (2008, 216) setting “the foundation of the idea of race in the new global structure of the control of labor” (2005, 184). Thus, as Ramón Grosfoguel and Santiago Castro-Gómez note, “the transition from modern colonialism to global colonialism, a process which has certainly modified the forms of domination unleashed by modernity, has not altered the structure of the center-periphery relationship on a global scale” (2007, 13; translated by the author). European migration policies, we could concede, are underpinned by the colonial gaze entrenched in a world order, marked not only by the ambitions of global strategies of capital accumulation and governance, but also by the logic of “colonial difference”. Walter Mignolo, in common with Quijano, encapsulates in the concept of “colonial difference,” the hierarchical differentiation and racial classification of populations from “the” European perspective (Mignolo, 2000, 16). Referring to Enrique Dussel’s concept of “exteriority,” (Dussel, 2005) through which Dussel discusses the construction of the Américas as the “Other” of Europe, Mignolo stresses the geopolitical and historical dimensions of this pattern of thinking. As Dussel demonstrates, the construction of the “Other” as “savage” and “primitive” served the colonisers’ strategies of exploitation. Through this cultural codification they created a resource for exploitation, legitimised by a discourse that “subsumed, alienated and incorporated [the colonised Other] into the dominating totality like a thing or instrument” (Dussel, 2000, 39). In other words, this population was reduced to “thingness”12 and treated as “raw material”. Whilst a colonial classification system is not explicit in contemporary national migration policies within the EU, the divide between “citizen” and “alien” (migrant and refugee) reverberates with the logic of coloniality. This becomes apparent, for example, in the entry and settlement requirements migrants and refugees need to fulfill to establish their lives within the EU zone. If they do not comply with the requirements set by migration laws,

12

The term ‘feminised subject’ refers to normative subjects socially perceived as women, but also to trans-subjects or subjects indentifying with femininity.

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they are denied entry to Europe and if they enter without permission, they risk falling into an explicit zone of dehumanisation by being made “illegal”. Under these conditions, for these migrants the question of precariousness is intrinsically connected to becoming undocumented, restricting their freedom of movement and their entry to the labour market (Maroukis, Iglicka and Gmaj, 2011; Düvell, 2005). The situation of “illegalisation” means that their freedom of movement is curtailed and they are also exposed to the constant threat of deportation, as well as precarious, unsafe and exploitative working conditions. It is through these dynamics that “colonial difference,” the creation of an “exteriority” to Europe is reactivated, both outside and within European territories. This “exteriority” within Europe is created in the interpellation of non-European or Eastern European migrants and refugees as the nation’s racialised and ethnicised “Other”. Though not explicitly addressing racial and ethnic differences, migration policies operate on the epistemic grounds of “colonial difference”. As Mignolo asserts, “colonial difference” entails the hierarchical differentiation and racial classification of populations from “the” European perspective (2000, 16). The interpellation and treatment of migrants and refugees as “invaders,” “impostors” and “aliens” by migration policies, invoke this population as the “Other” of the nation, codifying it as a body subjected to technologies of governance, information, surveillance and control. The “Other” of the nation is thus identified within and without the nation through the colour line, religious beliefs and cultural differences. While some European citizens might cope with precarity by opting to migrate, for non-EU migrants the loss of employment can have detrimental consequences for their residency status in Western Europe. The termination of their work contracts can impact negatively on the extension of their residency visa or convert them to targets of “return policies”. For example, for migrants who have “irregular” residency status, their access to the labour market is prescribed by the structural conditions in which national labour markets are stratified by gender, sexuality, nationality, religion and “race”. Thus, Quijano’s analysis of the “coloniality of labour,” referring to the hierarchical racial stratification of the organisation of work in colonial times in Latin America and its legacy for contemporary societies, is not only relevant for Latin America, but also for Europe. In Europe this pattern of thinking which differentiates between “skilled”/“unskilled” labour is shaped by the “colour line,” residency and/or migratory statuses. When it comes to femi-

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nised subjects13 processes of racialisation intersect with feminisation which urges us to uncover colonial links.

UNCOVERING COLONIAL LINKS As Maria Lugones argues the “Coloniality of Power” needs to be analysed in relation to the “Coloniality of Gender” (Lugones, 2007, 2010). Spanish and Portuguese colonialism not only exported a racialised system of social classification, but the Catholic Church’s patriarchal dichotomous view of gender was also institutionally imposed in all the colonies through the subordination of women and “femininity” as well as the imposition of the patriarchal monogamous heterosexual family. As Silvia Federici argues, the end of serfdom for some peasants and artisans in the 15th century in Europe signalled the intensification of this system for women and the colonised and enslaved populations (Federici, 2004). The oppression of women and their exclusion from public life and political participation was thus exported to the colonies, encountering other systems of gender relations, patriarchal or not.14 Nonetheless, despite the complex development of gender relations, organisation and roles in terms of their specific local socio-political and historical conditions, a common principle of patriarchal rule was established. That is, the codification of “femininity” as “exploitable nature” and “value less”. Epitomised in the social devaluation of women’s work and reproductive labour, European modernity is initiated and ingrained through the subordination of women and the colonised. This is the argument that the Bielefelder approach, developed by Veronika Bennhold-Thomsen, Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof (1987), attended to in Women, the last colony (in orig. Frauen, die letzte Kolonie). Departing from the framework of “triple oppression” (sex, race, class), they discussed housework and subsistence farming as the pillars of capital accumulation.

13

For further discussion cf. Lozano Verma, 2010; Suárez Navaz and Hernández Castillo, 2011; Marcos, 2010; and critique, cf. for example, Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán, 1997; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Curiel, 2007. 14 See, for example, Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Davis, 1981; Delphy, 1984; Hartmann, 1979. 15 For further discussion on this, cf. Boatça (forthcoming)

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Affirming observations widely shared by feminist critiques at this time,15 the Bielefelder approach insists on the interdependent relationship between production and reproduction and draws attention to the value character of feminised and racialised labour. The “housewife” and the “subsistence farmer” are used as metaphors for an economic world-order, divided into capital’s metropoles and peripheries16. Yet, this divide gives way to a perception that uses the “subsistence farmer” and the “housewife” interchangeably, thus avoiding a more complex analysis of power relations based on an analysis of “simultaneous interlocking systems of oppression” (Combahee River Collective, 1978). In 1978 the Combahee River Collective suggested in their Black Feminist Statement that we consider the simultaneous interlocking of different systems of oppression, noticing that gender relations are simultaneously shaped by class, sexuality and “race”. Processes of social inclusion and exclusion therefore do not affect all women in the same way as some women might be privileged on the basis of Whiteness or class advantages, while others might be subjugated through processes of racialisation and economic exploitation. Thus, to assume that all women are “housewives” disregards the fact that some women do not do housework as other women are cleaning, washing and caring for their children. “Housework” is not shared equally by all women nor can the “subsistence farmer” be used analogously to the “housewife”, as the situation of “housewives” in the global North is not identical to the “housewives” or the “subsistence farmers” in the global South. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1996) notes, this universal approach to feminisation and poverty negates the singularity of history and locality. The equation between conditions of life in the “global North” with the “global South” disregards the fact that the existence of a Welfare or Social State are not given in those regions in the same degree. This has an impact on how wealth is distributed as well as how workers’ rights and social welfare are organised. For the poor sections of society, workers’ rights and social welfare can entail the only social protection. At the time of the publication of Women, the last colony, the analysis presented by the Bielefelderinnen was considered in Marxist Feminism as a radical feminist proposal for understanding the intersection between racism, sexism and class. However, driven by an anti-imperialist and internationalist

16

This refers to an underground feminist punk movement, which emerged in the 1990s.

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sentiment of establishing solidarity between feminised and colonised subjects, the Bielefelder approach tended to obfuscate the specific local and historical conditions in which processes of feminisation interlock with processes of subalternisation. As well as the lack of differentiation of a variety of locally and historically specific expressions of femininity and gender relations, this approach also addressed “women” and “subsistence farmer” as victims of capital exploitation. Thus it ignored the complexity of the intersection of feminisation and racialisation with class, sexuality, religion, nationality and ability and obscured the dynamics of power relations between and within the genders (Davis, 1981; Lorde, 1984; Anzaldúa, 1987). In this vein, Chandra Talpade Mohanty formulated a critique of the universalising gesture inherent in the Bielefelder approach (Mohanty, 1991). Critiquing the Eurocentric epistemological presupposition, departing from the identity category woman debated in White European (German) feminism at that time and taking it as a point of reference and representation for all women worldwide, Mohanty stresses the need for conducting research that fundamentally addresses specific geo-political and historical conditions and understands the specificity of local social articulations and gender relations. Despite this critique, as already mentioned, the Bielefelder approach draws our attention to the logic of capital accumulation and its entrenchment with processes of differentiation based on feminisation and coloniality. It insists on the tendency of “housewifeisation” as a constitutive moment of capital production. Thus, “low waged” and “unwaged” work are not exceptions to, but fundamental for, capital production. Precarias’ analysis of feminisation and precarity seems to reconnect with this perspective. Yet, in contrast to the Bielefelder approach, Precarias’ analysis does not presuppose a universal identity category of woman. Acknowledging differences and power relations between women, their approach to feminisation stresses the structural dimension of “femininity” as point of reference for societal devaluation. Contrasting this approach with an analysis of the coloniality of labour and gender, reveals that the question of “who cares?” remains a pertinent one.

WHO CARES? Despite feminist activists’ campaigns for “wages for housework” in the 1970s, little has changed in the societal response regarding public policies on the

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provision of domestic and care work. In the EU zone, it is largely women who still opt to go part-time or take extended maternity leave. Even when they are employed full-time the responsibility for the household rests on their shoulders. This is even the case in households where gender equality is prioritised or where gender relations are based on lesbian, gay or queer kinship models (Carrington, 1999; Caixeta, et al., 2004). Thus, while the households may embrace gender equality, gendered divisions of work persist. Out of the need to balance family and professional life, households with a moderate to high income opt for the employment of domestic workers, cleaners and carers. For the women arriving in the EU zone and becoming illegalised, this work sector represents one of the entry points to the labour market. Together with their female employers, they find themselves stuck in this women’s terrain. Though relieved from this work and managing at a distance, the responsibility of the female employer for this work does not cease with the employment of a domestic worker. Domestic work sticks to these women’s bodies, although their strategies to deal with it differ enormously. Thus, while the female employer gains time to pursue her work, career needs and has regeneration time, the domestic worker is located in a cul-de-sac, not seeing an end to domestic work. When the paid shift is finished, the unpaid shift starts at home. No quality or relaxation time is scheduled in a busy domestic worker’s timetable, composed of multiple poorly paid jobs, long travelling distances and family duties. The national labour market is supplied by this cheap and “undeclared migrant” workforce, which contributes to national economic growth without any additional costs to the state as this workforce was raised and educated in their countries of origin (cf. the discussion in Herrera, et al., 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parreñas, 2001). Placed outside regularised work, they are excluded from any workers’ rights, social benefits, unemployment and health insurance. These workers not only contribute to the respective GNPs, but also to the circulation of international capital through their remittances to their countries of origin. Further, they support the career planning and personal development of more privileged women without significantly disturbing the traditional gendered division of work in the private households, in which it is predominantly the male’s professional ambitions that are prioritised. Despite the passing of the ILO Convention on Domestic Work (C 189) and Recommendation on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (R 201),

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recognising domestic workers as workers and establishing global labour standards for domestic workers on June 16, 2011, this sector still remains highly “irregularised” in most Western European countries. Considered as a private matter, most employment conditions and arrangements are individually negotiated between domestic workers and employers. The fear of loosing their employment and in the case of undocumented migrant domestic workers, their hesitation to officially claim their rights due to their insecure residency status, reduce these workers’ possibilities of taking legal action if their employers mistreat or fail to pay them. Bearing the traces of servitude and colonial labour, domestic work is characterised by (a) the lack of state protection; (b) its social devaluation, and (c) the attribution of “inferiority” to its labour force (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010). At the interface of these three levels, domestic work is configured as “simple labour” and its labour force as “unskilled labour,” hence, unwaged or poorly paid. The social value attached to this work has much less to do with its societal function than with its cultural perception and codification. Mutually configuring each other, this work and its workforce are both codified by processes of feminisation and coloniality. Thus, the “free” extraction of the productivity of this labour attends to a hidden script of disciplinary capitalism, in which feminised and racialised subjects are targeted as low waged or unwaged labour. In fact, capital invests in this labour in so far as it is artificially maintained outside of the circuits of capital accumulation. Domestic work in general, and “undocumented domestic workers,” in particular, thus, engender the place of “exteriority” in regard to a modernist project of capital accumulation. Their presence remains dictated by temporalities and conditions absent from a script of modern progress and prosperity. This is exposed in the working conditions of domestic workers characterised by oral contracts, unregulated working times, unsafe and vulnerable working conditions and high dependency on the employer. Left with a complete absence of rights, their working conditions are symptomatic of ‘crisis capitalism’ operating on the basis of precarious work. Yet, as this discussion has shown, precarity cannot just be deciphered through an analysis of feminisation. Rather our analysis needs to depart from an interlocking system of oppression, taking into account the coloniality of both power and gender in decolonising feminisation.

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CONCLUSION: DECOLONISING FEMINISATION While the culture industry celebrates post-feminist stars such as Jesse J, Lady Gaga or Rihanna, reflecting a popularised riot grrrl 17 subculture and resonating with some aspects of post/feminist-queer articulations, feminist critique on the devaluation of women’s labour has not lost its relevance. Rather, it has gained momentum due to the economic recession in Western Europe. Further, the dismantling of the last pillars of the Welfare State and increasing precarity demand an analysis of the logic of capital accumulation in relation to the endurance of coloniality and feminisation. Though queer-feminists are subverting femininity’s residual meaning through transgender/transsexual practices (Ziga, 2009), in regard to the organisation of labour ‘femininity’ still signals devaluation. When a feminised subject becomes a mother or needs to take care of a beloved person, she is reminded of the persistent cultural predication and the material conditions associated to ‘becoming woman’. The lack of public funding for care facilities for children and dependents, coupled with limited welfare incentives for mothers and carers, are indicative of the withdrawal of the state. Domestic and care work is still perceived as a private matter that is dealt with within the home. Women primarily manage this field, even when this work has been delegated to another woman, in most cases a “migrant,” poor or minoritised woman. Modern forms of capital production have not replaced colonial forms of production. Rather they conflate articulating current forms of capital production. Thus, as Quijano argues, the coloniality of labour is inherent to the logic of capital accumulation (Quijano, 2008; Mignolo, 2007). Coloniality in terms of the societal organisation of domestic and care work represents the underside of the modernist ambitions of European nation-states striving for gender equality on the public and private levels. Thus, behind post-feminist celebrations, coloniality and feminisation persist, shaping the new quality of labour as precarious in times of economic recession in Western Europe. However, to analyse precarity by setting its point of analysis in Europe, precludes the colonial connections that still permeate the global organisation of labour and the devaluation of a workforce marked by “colonial difference”.

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Cf. Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán, 1997; Curiel, 2007; Lugones, 2007.

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As decolonial feminists have argued, the heterosexual logic accompanying the framework of gender relations is sustained within a historical and geopolitical contexts.18 Therefore, its translation to the academic field, and in particular to the Western University system, might not always attend to this goal. This is so as the decolonial analysis can become a canon of knowledge contributing to the star rating and international popularity of individual scholars without contributing to social change. Decolonisation in this case is not just connected to an epistemological project, but to resistance struggles. Relating it to the analysis of feminisation and coloniality in Europe, decolonisation incites us to go beyond analysis and engage in the struggles for the rights of migrant and domestic workers (Blackett, 2011). Therefore, in order to understand the ambivalences in which femininity is interpellated, performed, enacted and embodied, we need to work with a historical perspective alongside a social analysis of global inequalities and their local expression, taking as its vantage point feminisation and coloniality. This calls forth an approach that embraces decolonising feminisation. REFERENCES ANZALDÚA, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books 1987. BENERÍA, Lourdes. Gender, Development, and Globalization. New York: Routledge 2003. BENNHOLDT-THOMSEN, Veronika, Maria MIES, and Claudia von WERLHOF. Frauen, die letzte Kolonie. Zur Hausfrauisierung der Arbeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Rotpunktverlag 1987. BLACKETT, Adele, ed. Special Issue: Regulating Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 23.1 (2011). BOATÇA, Manuela. Beyond Classical Concepts of Social Inequality. A Postcolonial Perspective on Inequality and Stratification in the Tradition of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Farnham: Ashgate (forthcoming). CAIXETA, Luzenir, Encarnación GUTIÉRREZ RODRÍGUEZ, Shirley Anne TATE, and Cristina VEGA SOLÍS. Homes, Care and Borders – Hogares, Cuidados y Fronteras. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños 2004. CARRINGTON, Christopher. No Place like Home. Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1999. CASTRO-GÓMEZ, Santiago, and Ramón GROSFOGUEL. “Prólogo. Giro decolonial, teoría crítica y pensamiento heterárquico.” El giro decolonial. Ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez, and Ramón Grosfoguel. Bogotá: Siglo de Hombres. 9-24.

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COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Home Girls. A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press 1983. 272-282. CORSANI, Antonella. “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism.” SubStance, Issue 112, 36.1 (2007): 107-138. CURIEL, Ochy. “Crítica postcolonial desde las practices políticas del feminismo antiracista.” Nómadas, 26 (2007): 92-101. DALLA COSTA, Mariarosa, and Selma JAMES. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. London: Butler and Tanner Ltd. 1972. DAVIS, Angela. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books 1981. DELPHY, Cristina. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. Translated by D. Leonard. London: Hutchinson 1984. DUSSEL, Enrique. 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro: Hacia el origin de “mito de la modernidad.” La Paz: Plural Editores 1994. — The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York: Continuum 1995. DÜVELL, Franck. Illegal Immigration in Europe. Beyond Control. Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan 2005. EHRENREICH, Barbara, and Arlie R. HOCHSCHILD. Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan 2003. FANTONE, Laura. “Precarious Changes: Gender and Generational Politics in Contemporary Italy.” Feminist Review, 87 (2007): 5-20. FEDERICI, Sylvia. Caliban and the Witch. Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia 2004. FOLBRE, Nancy. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. New York: Routledge 1994. GRUPO DE TRABAJO DE GÉNERO Y SEXUALIDAD. “En Sol estamos por lo de todos”,

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HOOPER, John. “Economic standstill sets Italians on the move.” The Guardian. 21.12.2011. KOFMAN, Eleonore. Family Reunion Legislation in Europe: Is it discrimatory for migrant women? Brussels: European Network of Migrant Women. 2011. L AZZARATO, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labour.” Radical Thought in Italy. Ed. Paolo Virno, and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996. 132-146. — “From Biopower to Biopolitics.” Translated by Ivan A. Ramirez, Pli. The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 13 (2002): 112-125. LORDE, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom: The Crossing Press 1984. LOZANO VERMA, Betty Ruth. “El feminismo no puede ser uno porque las mujeres somos diversas. Apuntes a un feminismo negro decolonial desde la experiencia de las mujeres negras del Pacífico colombiano.” La manzana de la Discordia, 5.2 (2010): 7-24. LUGONES, Maria. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypathia, 22 .1 (2007): 186-209. — “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, 25.4 (2010): 742-759. MARCOS, Sylvia. Cruzando Fronteras: mujeres indigenas y feminismos de abajo y a la izquierda. San Cristobal de las Casas: Universidad de la Tierra 2010. MAROUKIS, Thanos, Krystyna IGLICKA, and Katarzyna GMAJ. “Irregular Migration and Informal Economy in Southern and Central-Eastern Europe: Breaking the Vicious Cycle?” International Migration, 49.5 (2011): 129-156. MIGNOLO, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000. — “De-linking.” Cultural Studies, 21.2 (2007): 449-514. MOHANTY, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991. 51-80. NEGRI, Antonio. “Value and Affect.” boundary 2, 26.2 (1999): 77-88. — Negri on Negri. In conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle. New York: Routledge 2003. NEGRI, Antonio, and Michael HARDT. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2000. NEILSON, Brett, and Ned ROSSITER. “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception.” Theory, Culture & Society, 25.78 (2008): 51-72. ONGARO, Sara. “De la reproduction productive à la production reproductive.” Multitude, 12 (2003): 145-154. PARREÑAS, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001.

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PFAU-EFFINGER, Birgit. “Varieties of Undeclared Work in European Societies.” British Journal of Industrial Relations, 47.1 (2009): 79-99. PHILLIPS, Tom. “Portuguese migrants seek a slice of Brazil’s economic boom.” The Guardian. 22.12.2011. PHILLIPS, Tom, Uki GONI, and Alison ROURKE. “Argentina opens doors to migrants, but settling elsewhere is harder.” The Guardian. 22.12.2011. PHIZACKLEA, Annie, and Carol WOLKOWITZ. Homeworking Women. Gender, Racism and Class at Work. London: Sage 1995. PIDD, Helen. “Europeans migrate south as continent drifts deeper into crisis.” The Guardian. 21.12.2011. PRECARIAS A LA DERIVA. A la deriva: por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños 2004. QUIJANO, Anibal. “Colonialidad del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” Colonialidad del Saber, Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Comp. Edgardo Lander. Buenos Aires: CLACSO-UNESCO 2000a. 201-246. — “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology, 15.2 (2000b): 215-232. — “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification.” Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui. Durham: Duke University Press 2008. 181-224. REVEL, Judith. “Devenir-Femme de la politique.” Multitudes, 12 (2003): 125-134. RIVERA CUSICANQUI, Silvia. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: una reflexion sobre practices y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires : Tinta Limón y Retazos 2010. RIVERA CUSICANQUI, Silvia, and Rossana BARRAGÁN. Debates Postcoloniales. Una Introducción a los Estudios de la Subalternidad. La Paz: SEPHIS; Ediciones Aruwiyiri; Editorial Historias 1997. ROBLEDO, Juanjo. “Alemania, destino para los españoles sin trabajo.” BBC. 2.02. 2011. SANTIAGO-VALLES, Kelvin. “‘Race’, ‘Labor’, ‘Women’s Proper Place’, and the Birth of the Nations: Notes on Historicizing the Coloniality of Power.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003): 47-69. S ASSEN , Saskia. “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival.” Nordic Journal of International Law 71 (2002): 255-72. S/CONVEGNO (Manuela Galetto, Chiara Lasala, Sveva Magaraggia, Chiara Martucci, Elisabetta Onari, Francesca Pozi). “A snapshot of precariousness: voices, perspectivas, dialogues.” Feminist Review, 87 (2007): 104-112. SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” Diacritics 15.4 (1985): 73-93. — “The Woman as Theatre: Beijing 1995.” Radical Philosophy, 75 (1996): 2-4.

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SUÁREZ NAVAZ, Liliana, and Rosalva Aída HERNÁNDEZ CASTILLO. Descolonizando el feminismo: teorias y practices desde los margenes. Catedra: Madrid 2011. TIME 14.12.2011, (accessed 23.01.2012) TRAVIS, Alan. “Poor to be banned from bringing spouses to the UK from overseas.” The Guardian, 13.07.2011. Web. , 01.08.2011. VEGA SOLÍS, Cristina. Culturas del Cuidado en Transición. Barcelona: Editorial UOC; Niberta 2009. WILLIAMS, Colin. “Reconceptualizing Women’s and Men’s Undeclared Work: Some Results from a European Union Survey.” Gender, Work and Organization, 18.4 (2011): 415-437. ZIGA, Itziar. 2009. Devenir Perra. Barcelona: Melusina.

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“KULTURELLER RABATT” (“CULTURE DISCOUNT”)? THE DEBATE ABOUT A “CULTURAL DEFENCE” IN THE CRIMINAL LAW, AND WHAT GENDER HAS GOT TO DO WITH IT1 Caroline Braunmühl

ABSTRACT This paper points out certain mutual complicities in the rhetoric deployed by opponents and proponents of a so-called “cultural defence”, or “culture discount”, in the criminal law: a rhetoric that, on either side, is both fundamentally racialised/colonialist and un-feminist in trajectory–much as it is often couched in pseudo-feminist terms. I argue that what parades as a controversially conducted “democratic” debate (for vs. against a “cultural defence”) is in fact united by an underlying, exclusionary hegemonic consensus that binds together most of the political and social spectrum.

INTRODUCTION Since the 1980s, the U.S. media as well as journals for the legal profession have featured a debate regarding what has (misleadingly, as I will be arguing) come to be called “the cultural defence”. The question for debate has been posed as one of whether defendants to criminal charges should be allowed to present “evidence” regarding “their culture” in their legal defence. More recently, there have been signs that the debate has arrived in Germany as well as in Switzerland, amongst other European states. Tellingly, the “cultural defence” legal strategy here has been glossed in terms of the expression, kultureller Rabatt or “culture discount” (Frischknecht, 2009; Winkler, n.d.; Anonymous, 2007; Ohlendorf, n.d.). A gloss that contains in a nutshell the central–false, as I maintain–presupposition which shapes the entire debate: a presupposition shared by virtually all participants to it. Namely, the expression, “culture discount”, suggests that a consideration, within criminal proceedings, of “evidence” which concerns cultural differences is coterminous 1

I thank Professor Sarah Elsuni as well as Patrick von Braunmühl for advice concerning some legal aspects of my argument. Any errors that it may entail remain solely my responsibility, however.

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with dishing out some special favour to migrants or other minoritised, ethnicised subjects. This suggestion misleadingly insinuates that such a practice places subjects thus categorised at an advantage over and against “Others”, read: so-called “whites”. In this paper, I will question that assumption. I will argue that, on the contrary, the debate as a whole–in the very terms in which it has posed the question which provides it with its raison d’être–has contributed to an overall hegemonic, racialised project (Omi and Winant, 1994, 55-56) that incites resentment against minoritised communities, whilst legitimising, thereby, their unegalitarian treatment and control (Pautz, 2005; Römhild, 2007, esp. 218-20; Spindler, 2006, ch. 16; Razack, 2008). As we shall see, discourses of gender have figured as a central instrument made serviceable to that project. Both in the hands of self-avowed feminists pursuing a more or less unabashed anti-migrant agenda, and in the hands of those pursuing a relatively overt patriarchal agenda under the guise of a multiculturalism that must be characterised as pseudo-pluralist. These seemingly mutually antagonistic camps are best analysed as being, ultimately, united in an endeavour that is not only anti-migrant, as I will maintain, but also–in either variant: sexist or pseudofeminist–is detrimental to women, in general. Moreover, both positions within the debate as to the role of “cultural evidence” in the criminal-law system–for vs. against its acceptance by the courts–instrumentalise women of colour, in particular, as objects: in the pseudo-pluralist, often sexist variant, as legitimate objects of patriarchal practices; in the pseudo-feminist, overtly anti-migrant one, as objects of oppression by “their men” who are thus supposedly in need of imperialist “protection” by self-appointed white “saviours”. In what follows, I will first look at the discourse articulated by opponents of a “cultural defence”. Drawing on my analysis of the pertinent U.S. debate, conducted elsewhere (Braunmühl, 2012), I shall here focus upon its articulation within Germany, alongside brief references to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. As a second step, I shall illuminate the opposite position, taken by advocates of an ostensible “culture discount”. Thereafter, I will detail how it is that the two positions collude in a gendered racism that is contrary to both feminism and antiracism/anti-imperialism. In doing so, I provide a context-specific answer to the question–which in my view needs to be posed in an open-ended fashion–as to whether “gender” and “race” are interdependent in any given context. This question can only be answered

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empirically, on the basis of examining how these categories interrelate in the context at hand. In the case study that follows, I analyse gender as a discursive instrument deployed in furtherance of a racialised colonial discourse. If anything, I am thus diagnosing a one-sided “dependency” of the latter upon the former, without pursuing the question as to whether there is also a dependency in the opposite direction. However, the term “dependency” suggests a degree of necessity which I consider to be unwarranted: rather, it is my view that colonial discourse benefits from discourses of gender in the case at hand. I am thus framing the matter in terms of a contingent, if historically relatively stable, interplay between discourses.

THE RALLYING CRY AGAINST AN OSTENSIBLE “CULTURE DISCOUNT” In the U.S. context of the controversy pertaining to a so-called “cultural defence” (cf. Braunmühl, 2012, for details), the question for debate has been posed in terms of “whether to permit criminal defendants to introduce cultural evidence” (Maguigan, 1995, 36). Framing “the issue” in this way obscures the fact that, as I show elsewhere, “cultural evidence” is not necessarily used in criminal courts in defence of the accused (Braunmühl, 2012). Rather, prosecutors too have deployed “evidence” pertaining to ethnicity–either the defendant’s or that ascribed to a (putative) victim–as an element of their procedures of “proof ” for implicating a defendant in a crime. Considering this fact–which has been systematically ignored in the debate as to a “cultural defence”–it would seem to be absurd to put the question as it has been; namely, as to whether or not criminal defendants, exposed as they are to potentially discriminatory uses of “cultural evidence” by the prosecuting state, should be able to call upon such “evidence” themselves as part of their legal defence. Framing the question in this way also misleadingly suggests that addressing cultural, social, and psychological differences in applying the criminal law amounts to preferential treatment for migrant/minoritised subjects, which ostensibly places defendants socialised in the hegemonic ways at a disadvantage since they cannot resort to a “cultural defence”–thus jeopardising their equality before the law. I maintain that the contrary applies (cf. also, inter alia, Maguigan, 1995; Volpp, 1994): The law and its application to evidentiary constellations–especially to state of mind, which is central to mod-

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ern Western criminal “justice”–inescapably implicate cultural particularities, and hence, differences. Due to the Eurocentrism of the law and legal system, the available, standard legal defences (such as, for instance, self-defence) effectively constitute cultural defences for subjects positioned as hegemonic. (This fact makes the very term coined for the object of the debate–cultural defence–itself misleading. I therefore place in quotes this expression, along with similar ones, such as “cultural evidence”.) As a result, leaving “difference” unaddressed in constructing the human subjects to whom the law is applied effectively biases an already-Eurocentric law in favour of the cultural majority to an even greater extent. For, it will result in the classical fallacy of treating as universally applicable assumptions about what is psychologically and socially “normal”/probable/credible, as well as about what is normative in a moral sense, that in fact are Eurocentric. This is quite apart from the racialised and gendered (etc.) biases against certain groups of subjects on the part of a largely hegemonically constituted judiciary that risk playing into legal judgment as a matter of course, placing subjects of colour, in general, and migrant subjects of colour, in particular, at an additional disadvantage relative to “white” criminal defendants (Maguigan, 1995; Razack, 1998). Furthermore, constructing the use of so-called “cultural evidence” in the criminal “justice” system as inherently beneficial to minoritised subjects, or even as privileging them, serves to obscure the utterly colonialist, devaluing, and exclusionary discourses in terms of which both so-called “cultural defences” and equivalent prosecution strategies actually represent migrant subjects in court: namely, as culturally absolutely “Other” and, implicitly, as inferior beings (as shown, for the Belgian and the U.S. cases, respectively, by D’hondt, 2009, 2010, and Braunmühl, 2012). For this reason, the use of “cultural evidence” in criminal courts may very well be argued to contribute–on the contrary–to the hegemonic exclusion of the minoritised from “(national) community” (Razack, 2008; Koptiuch, 1996). Proposing or implying that it inherently privileges migrant or other minoritised subjects over and against the rest serves actively to reinscribe that Othering. It does so by rendering it invisible and, in fact, suggesting that the very opposite applies. This is to misconstrue as preferential treatment for “cultural minorities”, which ostensibly discriminates against “the majority”, a legal technique that, while in theory aimed at evening the scales of criminal “justice” at least somewhat, in practice jeopardises even that–egalitarian–aim because of the colonialist (and, often, sexist) ways in which “cultural evidence” is concretely

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constituted in criminal court. In this way, the debate as a whole–in its very existence, or mode of “discovering” the legal use of “cultural evidence” as “a problem” (Foucault, 1990)–feeds into the larger anti-minority hegemonic project that latently frames the migrant presence in the North as such as a problem (cf. Koptiuch, 1996). A “problem” that, once framed as such, legitimises the call for “solutions” that are exclusionary, assimilationist, or both (cf. Chiu, 1994)–even as, at the same time, any move directed at countering these unegalitarian politics is decried as “reverse discrimination” or “reverse racism”. In the German-language European context, the “moral panic” (Volpp, 1996, 1602-3) that has been stirred à propos the supposed availability of a socalled “culture discount” to migrant subjects has focused, not on the admissibility of “cultural evidence” in criminal proceedings, as such, but on the resultant potential for sentences to be reduced by judges in response to arguments by the defence that pertain to the defendant’s cultural background. This is what the term, “discount” or Rabatt, refers to. Despite this difference, and some others, between both contexts–differences that relate, amongst other factors, to the divergence between the U.S. vs. pertinent European (German; Swiss) legal systems2–the political function of the moral panic created, on both sides of the Atlantic, around the issue of criminal defences for accused migrant subjects is, at heart, analogous. I will be focusing upon this similarity, rather than upon any differences in the details, as I consider the former to be politically more decisive. The German-language analogy to the one-sided focus placed, in the U.S., upon “cultural evidence” used by the defence, rather than the prosecution, is (likewise) entailed in the very expression coined here as a rhetorical equivalent to the term, “cultural defence”; namely, the expression “kultureller Rabatt”. Both terms naturalise–treating as self-evident and, thereby, protecting from scrutiny–their own reduction of all potential, as well as actual, uses of so-called “cultural evidence” in the criminal legal system to those that, at a

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In the German-language context, the admission of “cultural evidence” is not treated as problematic in the way that it is in the U.S. This may be related to the fact that, in the “American” adversary system of “justice”–as contrasted with continental Europe’s inquisitorial systems of “justice”–the more neutral role of the judge foregrounds the issue of fairness to both sides and, hence, of fairness vs. bias in the admission of the “evidence” that here is introduced by the parties, rather than by the court.

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strictly pragmatic level, aim at producing an advantage for defendants in terms of sentence duration. The term “culture discount”, in particular, scandalises the ostensible privilege which migrant subjects are thereby supposedly afforded over and against “the majority”. Thus, it has entered German-language usage in the negative form of the slogan, “kein kultureller Rabatt”, that is: “no culture discount” for ethnic minorities (e.g., Winkler, n.d.; Anonymous, 2007; Ohlendorf, n.d.). Yet, as I will be showing, the public outcry against a supposed or actual preferential treatment for minorities in criminal sentencing may be analysed as being deployed in such a way as to legitimise the exact opposite: namely, moves towards criminalising law-breaking behaviour associated specifically with migrants of colour by way of calling for higher sentences in such cases. Discourses of feminism and patriarchy have played a crucial role in furthering this project. Thus, in (inter alia) Germany and the Netherlands, socalled “honour-related” killings have been the preferred “cause” around which those advancing that punitive, anti-migrant agenda have rallied (Maier, 2009; Siesling and Ten Voorde, 2009). As is well known, “honourrelated” violence tends to have strongly gendered connotations (Abu-Odeh, 1997). But, unlike so-called “crimes of passion”, in which women’s partners or ex-partners punish these for exercising independence–a form of violence which, likewise, tends to be patriarchal in logic (ibid.; Coker, 1992)–socalled “honour-related” violence is, at the same time, highly ethnicised. “Ethnicised” in the sense that it is being associated with people of colour, whereas “crimes of passion” are associated just as readily with “whites” and European or Euro-hyphenated “culture(s)”. Now, the narrative in which the rallying cry, “no culture discount”, is embedded usually starts out from the assertion that German courts up until recently have, indeed, tended to hand out milder sentences on grounds of ethnicity in the case of gendered crimes (Maier, 2009; Ohlendorf, n.d.; Anonymous, 2006) attributed to migrant men in particular. As other commentators have pointed out, this practice has been complicit in a patriarchal devaluation of the women of colour who frequently are the targets of “honour-related” violence (e.g., Louis, 2004; see also Volpp, 1994). Few critics, however, have recognised that such a “culture discount” may be based, not merely upon sexism, but upon racism at the same time, as I will propose at a later point in this paper (cf. also Braunmühl, 2012; Volpp, 1994; Maguigan, 1995; Koptiuch, 1996; Razack, 1998). It has been more common to inter-

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pret it in terms, on the contrary, of a fear on judges’ part of being accused of racism for punishing sexist violence in migrant communities (Maier, 2009, 233-4; Böhmecke, 2005, 18-9; cf. also Razack, 2008, ch. 4; 1998, ch. 3). A fear which, it is often concluded, should give way to a proactive intervention specifically against violence in migrant communities–such as “honour-related” violence (Maier 2009; Böhmecke, 2005; Louis, 2004)–that, explicitly or implicitly, is being attributed to a supposedly more patriarchal “culture” which is commonly ascribed to those communities, as compared to “mainstream culture” (cf. also Volpp, 1994; 1996). This is precisely the context in which the rallying cry, “no culture discount”–for “ethnic minorities”, that is–has been most prominent: It has been asserted that courts have, at least in the past, tended to classify so-called “honour killings” as manslaughter rather than murder, resulting in a lower sentence for the convict (Maier, 2009; Ohlendorf, n.d.). What is significant is that some commentators who critically point this out call for the opposite measure in the same breath (cf. also Siesling and Ten Voorde, 2009, 165-7, 169): “Honour killings”, it has been maintained, should be judged and sentenced as murder as a matter of principle (e.g., Maier, 2009, 244; Ohlendorf, n.d.). In fact, in Germany, CDU politician Kristina Schröder–at the time named Kristina Köhler and charged with reporting to the CDU/CSU on Islam and Islamic fundamentalism–in 2005 promoted a Bill, then discussed in parliament, that would have made it mandatory for judges to sentence so-called “honour killings” as murder (Maier, 2009, 244).3 I would consider either measure–classifying all cases of an “honour-related” killing as manslaughter or classifying all of them as murder–to be equally absurd. These alternative legal verdicts involve complex evidentiary questions that require consideration of the specific circumstances of the case at hand. They thus need to be decided upon on a case-by-case basis. The very classification of a given killing as being “honour-related”, in the first place, depends

3

Similarly, “in the Netherlands politicians on a regular basis launch proposals to enact a specific criminal law targeting individuals who commit honour-related violence. Also, legislative proposals for higher sentences can be found for those who commit these offences or who can be considered accomplices (for instance, family members). One extreme example in this context is the proposal to define honour-related violence as a terrorist act, which would make it possible to tap the phones of suspected families” (Siesling and Ten Voorde, 2009, 165-6, footnotes omitted).

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in large part upon how one defines that category–a category that, like other categories at issue here (such as manslaughter vs. murder), tends to be utterly naturalised in the public discourse at hand; as if it were an obvious, clear-cut essence of certain acts, and not a matter of categorising individual acts as qualifying for a given definition more or less clearly, leaving scope for ambiguity (cf. Braunmühl, unpublished manuscript) and, hence, for arbitrariness in decision-making. For instance, a verdict of murder that is based upon a finding that a given killing was committed out of “base motives” (according to §211 of the German Criminal Code) might be precluded by an additional finding that the killing–any killing, whether classified as an “honour killing” or otherwise–was committed impulsively rather than with premeditation (cf. Bundesgerichtshof, 2000; Rath, 2011). Demanding that all acts categorised as “honour killings” by those in charge be judged (and hence, sentenced) as cases of murder–or, on the other hand, that they all be judged as cases of manslaughter–would effectively deprive the defendants concerned of a right to which all whom the state accuses of a crime are supposedly entitled as a matter of law: namely, a consideration of the specific circumstances of his or her case (cf. Siesling and Ten Voorde 2009, 167, esp. n. 102). That is what “individualized justice” (Suri, 2000) is supposed to consist of! But the complexities of legal judgment are occluded from view entirely by those who call for what, effectively, would amount to setting apart certain (gendered) crimes–specifically, ones associated with men of colour–as deserving of more severe punishment than other (equally gendered) acts of killing another person. Whether it is more or less punishment that is being called for, or actually handed out by judges, on the basis of such classifications: either way, it would amount to instituting (or to call for an institution) of differential treatment that would reserve individualised judgment for particular categories of crime associated, inter alia, with “whites”. It would, in other words, amount to indirect discrimination against people of colour–which, aside from its practical effects, would symbolically reinscribe their historical reduction, on the part of colonial discourses, to an undifferentiated collectivity (see, e.g., Vaughan, 1991, esp. 11), thus declaring “individuality” a white privilege. Yet, what the one-sided scandalisation of courts’ allegedly more lenient treatment (in the past at least) of so-called “honour-related” killings as compared to “other”, culturally hegemonic crimes accomplishes is to misconstrue all manslaughter verdicts pronounced in cases of an “honour-related” killing

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as being ethnically biased in favour of minoritised communities, while at the same time representing the blanket treatment of “honour killings” as cases of murder that is being publicly demanded–and which, in 2004, has actually been prescribed to German courts by the Federal Court of Justice at least as a general rule, if with mixed results (Maier, 2009, 240 n. 19; Rath, 2011)–as somehow natural, even-handed, and devoid of any “ethnic” bias (i.e., as a matter, precisely, of individualised justice). This is most apparent in an expression through the use of which one text on “honour killings”–made available online as an educational resource for instruction in schools by the twin organisational networks COMCULT Schulnetzwerk and Education via Networks in the European Union (EDUVINET) Service, both of which receive EU funding4–goes even further as a way of denouncing as illegitimate any manslaughter verdict in the case of an “honour-related” killing: namely, the term Zweiklassenjustiz, meaning “two-class justice” (Ohlendorf, n.d., 3).5 A representation that, as explained above, fails to distinguish between individual verdicts of manslaughter in such cases that actually do take ethnicity into account from ones that may simply be based upon a “colour-blind” consideration of the specific circumstances of the case. The text at hand, too, calls for the opposite measure: namely, for “honour-related” killings to be judged and sentenced as murder in principle, that is, irrespective of the specifics of the case (ibid., 2-3; cf. n. 5, this article). In setting up that measure as the contrary of “two-class justice”, this “educational resource” identifies it with “colour-blind”, even-handed justice; the very opposite of discrimination based upon ethnic distinctions.

4 Cf. http://129.143.232.220/eduvinet/service-einfuehrung.htm and http://129.143. 232.220/comcult/d/index.htm, respectively (each accessed on 01.09.2011). 5 “Obviously, German courts thus far have classified honour killings as being ‘culturally determined’ and have evaluated them as manslaughter, not murder. It is high time that this ‘culture discount’ be abolished and that the ‘reinstitution of family honour through killing’ be declared a base motive and, thus, qua murder, carry a lifetime sentence. This evaluation has nothing to do with xenophobia or Islamophobia, but with respect for general human rights, which must apply to immigrants as well. German judges who do not understand this must allow themselves to be asked whether they are saying, by their cultural relativism, that human rights are divisible and apply only to Western civilisation, but not to the roughly 2.5 million Turkish immigrants who live in Germany. Such an interpretation of the law would amount to two-class justice or, put even more clearly, would border on complicity with patriarchal forces to which Occidental legal thinking is irrelevant” (Ohlendorf, n.d., 2-3, my translation).

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It is telling that such moves have nowhere drawn any outcry against “discrimination”: that an outcry has occurred exclusively in response to the idea of reduced sentences for so-called “honour killings”, while the call for aggravated sentences to be given out in all pertinent cases has been greeted by silence or even approval (e.g., Maier, 2009, 244; critically: Siesling and Ten Voorde, 2009). This lack of even-handedness exposes the criticism of a “culture discount” along the lines of the notion of “two-class justice” to be dishonest, revealing the real political agenda behind the public furore over a “cultural defence” or “culture discount”: While it poses as a call for all to be treated equally before the law (i.e., for a “colour-blind” jurisprudence), in fact it serves to advance the project of instituting an ethnicising dividing practice (Foucault, 1982, 208) in the sense I have explained. We are dealing, then, with a duplicitous rhetoric that masquerades as egalitarian and “colour-blind” as a “socially acceptable” way of pushing an anti-“minority” agenda. Here is why this ethnicising project is not straightforward in tactic; why it does not (usually–see below) proceed by calling explicitly for, to put it crassly, a “culture surcharge” in the sentencing of crimes that tend to be committed by subjects of colour: Doing so would “out” it as itself an ethnicising political project that targets migrants for a form, precisely, of “twoclass justice”. Imputing racial or ethnic discrimination to their opponents is helpful in that it diverts the gaze away from the anti-“minority”, racialised, discriminatory character of the policy promoted by those who level that charge. In the U.S. case, an equivalent function is served by the reduction–paramount in the entire debate there–of all “cultural evidence” admitted in criminal proceedings to instances of a “cultural defence”. So far, this reduction has remained entirely unremarked upon, and unaccounted for, as regards its biased character and possible discursive functions (cf. Braunmühl, 2012). I venture the following thesis regarding its function: As mentioned earlier, the equation produced in U.S. discourse between “cultural evidence” and “the cultural defence”, in particular, occludes from view the fact that “cultural evidence” is equally deployed against defendants by the prosecuting state–which thereby singles out particular defendants as a special category, of subjects whom it constitutes as ethnic and different–as a trial strategy aimed at having them convicted of a crime. If that fact were acknowledged, no one could tendentiously characterise “cultural defences” as being discriminatory against the “white” majority, while marketing their own posi-

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tion as a “colour-blind” one in the liberal sense associated with “equality before the law”.6 The very expressions, “cultural defence” and “culture discount”, respectively, thus ultimately function in such a way as to legitimise discrimination as something other than that; in fact, as anti- or non-discriminatory. Doing so is an effective rhetorical strategy. For, calling directly for higher sentences in the case of crimes associated with migrants would expose the discriminatory, “colour-conscious” character of this project; making it harder to defend. More recently, though, even such a more overtly discriminatory rhetoric has, in fact, been ventured by at least one academic commentator: Hallevy explicitly calls for harsher sentences to be imposed in what he refers to as “culture-based crimes against women”, as distinguished from “the same offenses committed in contexts other than culture” (2010, 466). A highly problematic distinction, which promotes the notion that some acts–specifically, sexist acts–are based upon culture while others are not. Thus, Hallevy writes: [F]or example, when a man rapes a woman, he deserves punishment. When a man rapes a woman out of cultural ideology, as an act of oppressing women or as an act preserving his culture, he deserves harsher punishment. [...] Thus, the courts should not only avoid mitigating sentencing in culture-based crimes against women, but also should issue harsher sentences (ibid., my emphasis).

To write this is to promote the patriarchal notion that rape is ever something other than “an act of oppressing women”, or that it is ever not committed “out of cultural ideology” in some other way. Obviously, this is itself a cultural notion. Hallevy’s disavowal of the inherently cultural character of rape is a thinly veiled attempt to legitimise a selective policing of certain sexist “cultures” in particular. Which one is apparent from the title of his article: “Culture-Based Crimes Against Women in Societies Absorbing Immigrants–Rejecting the ‘Mistake of Law’ Defense and Imposing Harsher Sentencing” (2010). 6 The following quotation exemplifies this practice. It is taken from a landmark text authored by one of the main figures within the debate who polemicise against “the cultural defence”: “[T]o the extent that cultural evidence is used to determine the outcome of criminal cases and to excuse some perpetrators of crimes, it results in disparate treatment of immigrants and other members of American society” (Coleman, 1996, 1096).

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It seems too soon to say whether or not this overt call for punishing “immigrants” more harshly (and for the very same acts) is indicative of a shift in the reigning hegemonic consensus. A consensus the post-civil rights state of which Omi and Winant once described, in the mid-1990s, as follows for the U.S. case: The accomplishments of the 1960s could not simply be reversed. Since 1965, for example, it has become impossible to argue for segregation or against racial equality. Any “legitimate” politics must claim to favor racial equality in the abstract, even if specific egalitarian measures are condemned. To argue for a return to the explicitly racist ideology of pre-civil rights movement days is to move to the proto-fascist fringes of the far right (1994, 140, original emphasis).

It is certainly possible to view the debate on “cultural evidence” as an early indicator of the shifting balance of forces within hegemonic struggle manifested since 9/11. These would seem to have made an overt racialised resentment (at least more) “respectable” again, along with racial profiling of all sorts (Razack, 2008; Butler, 2004). Moreover, for whatever reason, in the European version of the debate on a “culture discount”–which is a post-9/11 phenomenon to my knowledge–that resentment is more unabashed, more overtly aggressive than in its U.S. counterpart (where the debate has been raging for much longer). Thus, in German-speaking Europe at least, I am aware of only one positive proponent of a “cultural defence”. Here, then, opposition to it is virtually consensual, very much unlike in the U.S. case (cf., esp. Renteln, e.g., 2004).

THE POSITION SUPPORTIVE OF AN OSTENSIBLE “CULTURE DISCOUNT” AND ITS COMPLICITY WITH RACIALISED, GENDERED EXCLUSION It is to the position promoting a “cultural defence” that I will now turn. Based upon the example of its German-language representative, legal scholar Tom Frischknecht, I will argue that this position tends to collude in the racism of the pseudo-feminist, colonialist discourse of its opponents. (I use the term “pseudo-feminist”, rather than “feminist”, for reasons I shall detail later on.) Here, however, racism is combined, not with a pseudo-feminist rhetoric but, instead, with a sexism that “tolerates”, on grounds of multiculturalism, what here is, likewise, construed as a patriarchal character particu-

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larly of “the other cultures” concerned, as against the mainstream cultural “self ” (cf., e.g., Anonymous, 1986; Van Broeck, 2001; Donovan and Garth, 2007). Thus, Frischknecht raises the question as to “whether the individual responsibility on the part of men who corporally punish their wives [die ihre Ehefrau züchtigen, sic!] tends to be diminished when they stem from a strongly patriarchal environment” (2009, 76, my translation; cf. also ibid., 347). His book as a whole clearly answers this question affirmatively, in the sense that its author comes out in support of a potential mitigating effect of cultural background in criminal “justice” (as a factor to be considered on a case-bycase basis) without making any qualifications or critical comment whatsoever regarding the extent to which cultural “tolerance” should stop short of allowing whatever kind of sexist devaluation of human beings to figure as a mitigating circumstance in sentencing (cf. esp. ibid., 346-7). He envisages no principle obstacle to such a result even in homicide cases. Much as the position taken by Frischknecht parades as “tolerant” of cultural differences, he has–significantly–entitled his book on the matter of “cultural evidence” in the Swiss legal system by the very term, “culture discount” (“Kultureller Rabatt”), which–as I have argued–participates in misrepresenting the use of such “evidence” as necessarily benefiting defendants of colour over and against “white” ones. In doing so, he contributes to the overall anti-minority project of constructing communities of colour as being given some sort of preferential legal treatment in virtue of this practice. For, construing a consideration of cultural differences in the criminal “justice” system as a special privilege potentially enjoyed by migrants is to help nurture the increasingly unabashed hegemonic resentment that is being cultivated against them as a class–an atmosphere conducive to their punitive criminalisation–and, thus, is to contribute to the racist exclusion of the latter as a class. For this reason, it seems apt to characterise the seemingly multiculturalist support given by Frischknecht for what he nonetheless labels with the xenophobic expression, “culture discount”, as pseudo-pluralist. After all, to ethnicise groups of people as inherently Other (“fremdkulturell ”, as he writes [2009, passim]), and to construct the resultant hegemonic “us” as implicitly superior in virtue of calling upon that “us” to extend some tolerance to “their” supposedly greater sexism is to practice a paternalist condescension that flies in the face of any true respect for differences. What we are dealing with, then, in regard to the relationship between the two mainstream positions vis-à-vis the use of “cultural evidence” in

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the criminal “justice” system 7 is two variants of an ethnicising project engaged in racialised Othering (partially) on the basis of discourses of gender: On one side, a “multiculturalist” variant of neocolonial discourse–represented in the European context by Frischknecht’s legal treatise–that styles itself as “sympathetic” to an ethnicised “them” cast out of a national “us” (Razack, 2008) and, thus, might be glossed (ironically speaking!) as foreigner-friendly. This pseudo-pluralism is, at the same time, an androcentric one: It constitutes women of colour as legitimate objects of the sexist norms and practices of (Othered) men, in the defence of which practices multicultural “tolerance” is here enlisted. It thus excludes women of colour from the already-Othered “them” to whom “we” are asked to extend tolerance. On the other side–in the camp that opposes any so-called “culture discount”–we are dealing with an overtly hostile variant of anti-migrant racism. As for the function of discourses of gender within it, it poses, analogously, as woman-friendly, while seemingly reserving its antagonism for the male section of the minoritised “Other”. Yet, as indicated earlier, patronising Othered women as objects in need of benevolent “white” protection is hardly any more truly feminist–i.e., inclusive of all women–than the position represented by Frischknecht is truly pluralist, or egalitarian with respect to cultural difference. I am arguing, then, in favour of considering both main positions in the discussion surrounding “cultural evidence” in the application of the criminal law as mere variants of a gendered racism. That is to say, what–on the surface–seem to be mutually opposing positions within a “controversially” conducted “democratic” debate (for vs. against), in fact are united by an underlying, anti-migrant and un-feminist, hegemonic consensus that binds together most of the political and social spectrum (cf. Pautz, 2005, esp. 114, 129; Römhild, 2007, esp. 218-20). This holds for both sides of the Atlantic, to the extent to which I have been able to consider them here.

7

I offer a more comprehensive analysis of the debate, including alternative positions beyond the main camps (“for” vs. “against”), elsewhere (Braunmühl, 2012).

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EXTRAPOLATING FROM THE ABOVE CASE STUDY: RACIST/IMPERIALIST “FEMINISM” IS NO FEMINISM What that consensus excludes from its purview is a set of alternative discursive possibilities: It establishes a constitutive outside (Butler, 1993, 3, 8, 22) that makes it difficult to imagine the possibility of moving beyond this consensus. The latter sets feminism and antiracism off against each other as antagonists, if not competitors, in what could be analysed in terms of the “divide-and-rule” discursive strategy which figured so prominently already within colonialism. So-called “white”, Eurocentrically identified women risk being “had” by that strategy when they ask women of colour to pick and choose between feminism and antiracism, as many have done (e.g., Okin, 1999; Coleman, 1996; critically: Volpp, 2001). Isolating the feminist political project from those of antiracism and anti-imperialism is to remain caught up in what Laclau and Mouffe, echoing Gramsci, have properly identified as a narrow, “individualistic problematic” (1985, 184). They write: For the defence of the interests of the workers not to be made at the expense of the rights of women, immigrants or consumers, it is necessary to establish an equivalence between these different struggles. It is only on this condition that struggles against power become truly democratic, and that the demanding of rights is not carried out on the basis of an individualistic problematic, but in the context of respect for the rights to equality of other subordinated groups (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 184, my emphasis).

But even the antiracist and postcolonial feminist counter-strategy, of accusing “white” and Eurocentrically identified women of a parochial and chauvinistic sort of feminism (e.g., Volpp, 1996; 2001; Razack, 1998; 2008), may not go far enough in pushing beyond the hegemonic articulation (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 178; see below) of feminism and antiracism/antiimperialism as antagonists. The upshot of the analysis I have offered is to argue that neocolonialism/imperialism–at least of the (gendered) sort I have talked about–is ultimately incompatible with feminism. Or, put the other way around, that a colonialist, “white” variant of feminism (Mohanty, 1994; Ware, 1992) is no feminism, after all. And not solely because it is exclusionary towards women of colour in virtue of its Eurocentric and racialised (e.g., anti-migrant) modes of articulation, as has been argued for a long time.

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Beyond this point, it cannot be in the interest of any woman–including women interpellated as “Western and white” by imperialist discourse–to be enlisted as “assistants”, literal handmaidens, to a political project that entails disavowing or minimising the extent to which, as women, they continue to be subordinated by specifically Western forms of patriarchal socio-discursive order.8 Which is the central characteristic of the type of gendered racism analysed above (cf. also Razack, 2008). While neocolonial and other, older forms of imperialism cater to the narcissism of the women whom they interpellate as (culturally or biologically) superior beings, and while they also offer them the material privileges that go with occupying that status within white supremacy, at the same time, they subordinate–and, thus, are contrary to–their interest in a liberation from gender-specific forms of subordination. The type of gendered, imperialist racism I have analysed is thus at least ambiguous in effect when considered with a view to what it does for or against those whom it positions as “Western, white women”; even in its supposedly “woman-friendly” variant. That is why I evaluate it as merely pseudo-feminist–and this assessment encompasses the contributions by selfavowed “feminists” to the anti-migrant hegemonic project, in particular, and to imperialist racism, more generally (in our context, cf. esp. Young, 1992; Coleman, 1996; Okin, 1999). The political ramifications of this assessment consist in promoting an articulation of feminism and an antiracist anti-imperialism as allies, rather than alternatives. I do so as an expressly discursive move–one that answers to the understanding, propagated already in the 1980s by Laclau and Mouffe, that: There are not, for example, necessary links between anti-sexism and anti-capitalism [or anti-racism, C.B.], and a unity between the two can only be the result of a hegemonic articulation (1985, 178, my emphasis).

Asking women identified with Eurocentrism, if not with white supremacy, to understand antiracism as a commitment that is in their very own inter-

8 In using the adjective, “patriarchal”, I do not mean to signify “patriarchy” as a uniform, universal structure. Rather, I use that term to identify two defining features shared by very heterogeneous forms of gendered socio-discursive order: The “heterosexual matrix” (Butler, 1999, 194 n. 6) as I conceive of it (a) defines into existence two generic “sexes”, of which (b) the category “male” is being privileged as normative.

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est as feminists might provide us with a hegemonising strategy far more effective than morally condemning them for their racism. I propose that we begin to construct “feminism” in such a way as to win over women so far interpellated as “Western/white” to an alternative, counter-hegemonic identification (Hall, 1995; Mercer, 1994, esp. 280) or self-understanding. One in which feminism simply cannot be had without antiracism and anti-imperialism.

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COLEMAN, Doriane L. “Individualizing Justice through Multiculturalism: The Liberal’s Dilemma.” Columbia Law Review, 96 (1996): 1093-1167. D’HONDT, Sigurd. “Others on Trial: The Construction of Cultural Otherness in Belgian First Instance Criminal Hearings.” Journal of Pragmatics, 41 (2009): 806-28. — “The Cultural Defense as a Courtroom Drama: The Enactment of Identity, Sameness, and Difference in Criminal Trial Discourse.” Law and Social Inquiry, 35 (2010): 67-98. DONOVAN, James M., and John Stuart GARTH. “Delimiting the Culture Defense.” Quinnipiac Law Review, 26 (2007): 109-46. FOUCAULT, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982. 208-26. — The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Transl. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin 1990. FRISCHKNECHT, Tom. “Kultureller Rabatt”: Überlegungen zu Strafausschluss und Strafermässigung bei kultureller Differenz. Bern; Stuttgart; Wien: Haupt Verlag 2009. HALL, Stuart. “Fantasy, Identity, Politics.” Cultural Remix: Theories of Politics and the Popular. Ed. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires. London: New Formations; Lawrence and Wishart 1995. 63-9. HALLEVY, Gabriel. “Culture-Based Crimes against Women in Societies Absorbing Immigrants–Rejecting the ‘Mistake of Law’ Defense and Imposing Harsher Sentencing.” Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender, 16 (2010): 439-67. KOPTIUCH, Kristin. “‘Cultural Defense’ and Criminological Displacements: Gender, Race, and (Trans-) Nation in the Legal Surveillance of US Diaspora Asians.” Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Ed. Smader Lavie, and Ted Swedenburg. Durham; London: Duke University Press 1996. 215-33. LACLAU, Ernesto, and Chantal MOUFFE. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Transl. Winston Moore, and Paul Cammack. London: Verso 1985. LOUIS, Chantal. “Kampf der tödlichen Ehre” 2004. EMMA, Nov./Dec. Web. 1 September 2011. . MAGUIGAN, Holly. “Cultural Evidence and Male Violence: Are Feminist and Multiculturalist Reformers on a Collision Course in Criminal Courts?” New York University Law Review, 70 (1995): 36-99. MAIER, Sylvia. “Honor Killings and the Cultural Defense in Germany.” Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense. Ed. MarieClaire Foblets, and Alison Dundes Renteln. Oxford; Portland: Hart Publishing 2009: 229-46.

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MERCER, Kobena. “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics.” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. Ed. Ibid. New York; London: Routledge 1994. 259-85. MOHANTY, Chandra T. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams, and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press 1994. 196-220. OHLENDORF, Edmund. Ehrenmord. Web. 1. September 2011. . OKIN, Susan Moller. “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? Susan Moller Okin with Respondents. Ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999. 7-24. OMI, Michael, and Howard WINANT. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. London: Routledge 1994. PAUTZ, Hartwig. Die deutsche Leitkultur: Eine Identitätsdebatte. Neue Rechte, Neorassismus und Normalisierungsbemühungen. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag 2005. RATH, Christian. “Nicht jeder Fall wird auch als Mord bestraft” 2011. Badische Zeitung, 3 August. Web. 1. September 2011. . RAZACK, Sherene H. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press 1998. — Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics. Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press 2008. RENTELN, Alison D. The Cultural Defense. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press 2004. RÖMHILD, Regina. “Alte Träume, neue Praktiken: Migration und Kosmopolitismus an den Grenzen Europas.” Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas. Ed. TRANSIT MIGRATION Forschungsgruppe. Bielefeld: Transcript 2007. 211-22. SIESLING, Mirjam, and Jeroen TEN VOORDE. “The Paradox of Cultural Differences in Dutch Criminal Law.” Multicultural Jurisprudence: Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense. Ed. Marie-Claire Foblets, and Alison Dundes Renteln. Oxford; Portland: Hart Publishing 2009. 145-73. SPINDLER, Susanne. Corpus Delicti: Männlichkeit, Rassismus und Kriminalisierung im Alltag jugendlicher Migranten. Münster: Unrast-Verlag 2006. SURI, Sharan K. “A Matter of Principle and Consistency: Understanding the Battered Woman and Cultural Defenses.” Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, 7 (2000): 107-39.

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THE AUTHORS OF THE BOOK

Ezequiel ADAMOVSKY is associate professor at the Department of History at the University of Buenos Aires and researcher of CONICET. He is the 2009 winner of the James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize, granted by the Conference on Latin American History (USA). His interest in the racial/ethnic dimension to class identities is pivotal in his recent publications, for example in Historia de la clase media argentina (Planeta, 2009). Sarah ALBIEZ-WIECK is managing director of the Research Network for Latin America in Cologne. She studied Latin American Area Studies in Cologne, Lisbon and Mexico City and holds a PhD in Anthropology of the Americas from the University of Bonn. Her research interests include West Mexico before and after the Spanish conquest, especially the external contacts of the Tarascan state and questions of ethnicity and belonging in prehispanic and colonial times. Björn ALPERMANN is assistant professor of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He is currently conducting a research project on Social Stratification and Political Culture in Contemporary Urban China funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Floya ANTHIAS is currently professor of Sociology and Social Justice (Emeritus) at Roehampton University and visiting professor of Sociology at City University, London. She has explored the connections between different forms of social hierarchy and inequality (often referred to as intersectionality), migration, social stratification, social capital, and multiculturalism and gender. She has also published on Cyprus. Her most recent work has been developing the concept of translocational positionality as a way of addressing some of the difficulties identified with concepts of hybridity, identity and intersectionality.

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Dennis AVILÉS IRAHOLA has a master in Human Ecology and a PhD in Development Research from the University of Bonn. She works as an independent consultant on local development, participatory methods and gender mainstreaming. For more than ten years she has worked on gender mainstreaming and peasants’ participation in rural development and environmental programs in Latin American countries and, shortly, in Africa and Asia. Caroline BRAUNMÜHL received her PhD degree from the University of Hamburg, Germany, based upon her book Colonial Discourse and Gender in U.S. Criminal Courts (Routledge 2012). It presents a poststructuralist discourse analysis of so-called “cultural-defense” trial strategies–along with equivalent techniques deployed by the prosecuting state–and critiques the U.S. debate on the subject. She is a sociologist publishing in the fields of poststructuralist theory as well as in cultural, gender and postcolonial studies. Daniela CÉLLERI is doctoral researcher at the Research Network for Latin America at the Leibniz University of Hanover. She studied Social Sciences with emphasis on ethnicity and migration, indigenous movements and the nation state, social inequality and development theories in Latin America as well as Gender Studies. Currently, she is investigating the influence of class, gender, ethnicity and age on the returning decisions of young migrants in Otavalo, Ecuador. Sérgio COSTA is a professor of Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and a co-chair of the Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America (desiguALdades.net). Trained in economics and sociology in Brazil and Germany, he has previously held positions at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and at the CEBRAP, Cento Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento, Brazil. He has specialised in democracy and differences, social inequalities, and transnational politics. He has made major contributions to postcolonial theory, critical theory and cultural studies. Encarnación GUTIÉRREZ RODRÍGUEZ is senior lecturer in Transcultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her areas of research are critical migration studies, decolonial perspectives in social and cultural theory (feminist and critical race studies), qualitative social research and ethnography. Among

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her recent publications are Migration, Domestic Work and Affect (2010); Decolonizing European Sociology (2010); Intersektionalität: Oder wie nicht über Rassismus sprechen? (2011), and Politics of Affect and Transversal Conviviality (in German and English, 2011). Olena PRYKHODKO is PhD student at the Department for Cultural Studies and the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Bremen, investigating consumer citizenship as a media project. Previously she has accomplished another interdisciplinary PhD project on gender subjectivity at the intersection of popular culture and politics at Karazin University and the Center for Gender Studies in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her research interests include studies in popular culture, subject and identity construction, media studies, and gender analysis of the society. URSULA REGEHR is doctoral researcher in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. Her research is focusing on colonisation and nation-building processes, interdependent dimensions of social inequality and social movements in the Paraguayan Chaco. She worked as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern (2005-2009) and was a short-term-scholarship holder from the Research Network desiguALdades.net at the Freie Universität Berlin (2010). In Paraguay she curated the exhibition Simetría/asimetría: imaginación y arte en el Chaco (2011). Ulrike SCHMIEDER is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Hanover. She studied Latin American Sciences at the University of Rostock, did her PhD in History at the University of Leipzig and wrote her second doctoral thesis on gender history of Mexico, Cuba and Brazil in the 19th century at the University of Cologne. Actually she is researching “Strategies and Agendas of Former Slaves in Cuba and Martinique after Slavery” at the University of Hanover. Her main research interests are: comparative history of slavery and postemancipation societies, comparative gender history of Europe and the Americas. Tobias SCHWARZ is postdoctoral researcher at the Research Network for Latin America in Cologne. He studied Cultural Studies in Berlin and London with an emphasis on migration policy, national identity and racism and investigated the administration of foreigners and the contemporary German dis-

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course of expulsion. Currently he is conducting a research project on legal exclusion in Latin America. Bea WITTGER is doctoral researcher at the Research Network for Latin America in Cologne. She studied Latin American Studies in Cologne and Bahía Blanca. Her research interests include Social Movements, Gender Studies and questions of Social Inequality and Exclusion in Latin America. Currently, she is conducting a research project on constructions of citizenship and gender in the squats of the urban housing movements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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FORTHCOMING VOLUME IN THIS SERIES: EL SIGUIENTE VOLUMEN DE ESTA COLECCIÓN:

Mobilizing Ethnicity – Competing Identity Politics in the Americas: Past and Present The third volume of this series contains interdisciplinary contributions that address the issue of ethnic identity politics and investigate, amongst others, the negotiation of political participation and the involved phenomena of social in- and exclusion in the Americas from a historical as well as a from a contemporary perspective.

Movilizando etnicidad – Contienda de políticas de identidad en las Américas: pasado y presente El tercer volumen de esta colección contiene aportes interdisciplinarios que tratan la cuestión de las políticas de identidad étnica, e investigan, entre otros objetos, la negociación de la participación política y los fenómenos involucrados en la inclusión y exclusión social en las Américas desde una perspectiva histórica y contemporánea.

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We would like to thank the institutions that have kindly given us copyright permission. Editors and publisher have tried to find all owners and inheritors of the copyright of each illustration in this book. Individuals and institutions in possession of rights who have not been contacted and are interested in enforcing them are requested to contact the publishing company.