Landscapes of Devils

Gordillo Gaston R. Gordillo

Description

Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in northern Argentina's Gran Chaco region. In the early twentieth century, the Toba were defeated by the Argentinean army, incorporated into the seasonal labor force of distant sugar plantations, and proselytized by British Anglicans. Gaston R. Gordillo reveals how the Toba's memory of these processes is embedded in their experience of "the bush" that dominates the Chaco landscape.As Gordillo explains, the bush is the result of social, cultural, and political processes that intertwine this place with other geographies. Labor exploitation, state violence, encroachment by settlers, and the demands of Anglican missionaries all transformed this land. The Toba's lives have been torn between alienating work in sugar plantations and relative freedom in the bush, between moments of domination and autonomy, abundance and poverty, terror and healing. Part of this contradictory experience is culturally expressed in devils, evil spirits that acquire different features in different places. The devils are sources of death and disease in the plantations, but in the bush they are entities that connect with humans as providers of bush food and healing power. Enacted through memory, the experiences of the Toba have produced a tense and shifting geography. Combining extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, historical research, and critical theory, Gordillo offers a nuanced analysis of the Toba's social memory and a powerful argument that geographic places are not only objective entities but also the subjective outcome of historical forces.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 06 décembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386025
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Landscapes of Devils

     .      

Landscapes of Devils

                  

               

Duke University Press Durham & London



©  Duke University Press

All rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Dante with Cather display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

A mis padres

The philosophy of praxis is absolute ‘‘historicism,’’

the absolute secularization and earthliness of thought . . . . It is along

this line that one must trace the thread of the new conception

of the world.—Antonio Gramsci,Prison Notebooks

To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake

of the contradiction once experienced in the thing, and against that

contradiction.—Theodor Adorno,Negative Dialectics

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 

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xi xv

The Making of the Bush . Landmarks of Memory  . Heaven and Hell  . Places of Violence  . Searching for Our Fathers  . A Kind of Sanctuary  . ‘‘In the Bush, You Can Do Anything’’

Bones in the Cane Fields . The Promised Land  . ‘‘It Seemed Like We Lived There’’  . The Breath of the Devils  . ‘‘We Returned Rich’’  . ‘‘Dancing, Dancing, Dancing’’  . ‘‘We Didn’t Go on Strike’’ 



Foraging Until the End of the World . ‘‘We’re Not Going to Die’’  . The Production of Local Knowledge  . ‘‘With the Fish, We’re Rich’’  . Journeys to Strange Lands  . Locations of Contention and Hegemony  . The Other Side 

Conclusions  Glossary  Notes  References  Index 