Shifting Frontiers: Historical transformatións of identities in Latin America

Bull. Letin

Pergamon

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Am. Res., Vol. 14, No. 1. pp. l-7, 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd 0 I YY4 Society for Latin American Studies Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0261-3050/95$9.50+.00

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Shifting Frontiers: Historical Transformati6ns of Identities in Latin America RICHARD AFRAS,

WILSON University of Sussex

This special issue of the Bulletin of Latin American Research explores the heterogeneous transformations of American and European identities from the 1500s to the present. The contributors are from two disciplines which have exerted an increasing influence over each other in recent years; anthropology (Watanabe, Harris and Wilson) and literary theory (Bellei, Huhne and Rowe). The collection considers, in distinctive contexts, the seemingly opposed but inseparable processes of absolute difference and cultural incommensurability on the one hand and relational identification and cultural intertwining on the other. In this introduction I argue that we can see these paradoxical processes as constitutive of each other, and as repetitive patterns in identity formation. MYTHICAL STRUCTURES FOR PERCEIVING DIFFERENCE In the initial era of the colonial context, European and American societies approached cultural difference within rigidly defined frameworks. Olivia Harris points out that, historically, more emphasis has been placed on the inflexibility of indigenous rather than European notions for coping with the alien. The emphasis has been on the degree to which indigenous peoples incorporated white people into their pre-existing ‘mythical structures’, for example in the well-known account that Cartes was perceived as the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Harris questions the legitimacy of such mythologies of ‘white gods’ and indicates that they are perhaps more likely to have been strategies of conquest promoted by the Spanish. Further, these claims for god-like status are part of the construction of modern European identity, in which the arrival of Columbus in the Americas is seen as a watershed date. Harris quotes Todorov (1984: 4-5) who writes that ‘The conquest of America . . . heralds and establishes our present identity. . .’ In many indigenous cultures, ‘contact’ is less emphasised as an event since it does not have the same pivotal role to play for present-day identities. There is ample evidence in this collection that Europeans, too, have operated with inflexible ‘mythical structures’. The classificatory paradigms for perceiving difference which operated in a medieval European context took on a new dynamic as they became intertwined with emerging processes of colonial power. As Elsa C. Frost writes (1993: 119), ‘Land and people were seen by many of the [Spanish] chroniclers through a special prism that rendered forms and colours in such a manner that they seemed like the

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fulfilment of old aspirations.’ The Spanish gaze was mediated by a preexisting perceptual prism with many facets. Attempts were made, for example, to show how indigenous peoples were the descendants of Adam. Cannibalism featured strongly in European imaginations, and images of incommensurability were enshrined in the Spanish ‘Cannibal Law of 1503’ which sanctioned the capture and enslavement of all those labelled as cannibals. Europeans did not deny that the peoples of the Americas were human (as is commonly assumed), but debates raged as to the extent to which they were capable of rationality. This debate, crucial in the construction of the modern Western self, could not help but play itself out in this new colonial context. Evidence for indigenous rationality was seen to lie in the existence of state political institutions according to Aristotelian criteria or, for Columbus, in their knowledge and use of arms. This line of enquiry exposed what Fray Bartolome de la Casas (1965: 13) termed, ‘the fatal discord . . . between a scandalous and faulty science and a depraved conscience’. Harris argues persuasively that the ‘othering’ of indigenous peoples by Europeans continues in a number of modem academic approaches; in those which still give credence to mythologies of white men as gods, and those which draw on the Levi-Straussian opposition between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies. Harris makes a trenchant critique of Tzvetan Todorov’s proposal that European understandings of contact were perceived in terms of temporal events, contexts and history, whereas indigenous peoples categorised the Spanish invasion in a timeless and inflexible mythical code. Further, Harris suggests that many who have argued that indigenous peoples incorporate history into their myth (e.g. Hill, 1988) implicitly assume that history begins with the arrival of whites. European representations of identities have not been solely exclusive, monological or distancing. Many early (and later) European discourses on America posited both commensurability and incommensurability between European and indigenous cultures. There has existed a diversity of contested meanings, and discourses on cultural encounters have been negotiated historically, and according to each local context. In Anthony Pagden’s European Encounters with the New World, reviewed by Peter Hulme, we see how Europeans sought to manage the evident incommensurability of American cultures by erasing distance and denying difference. This was achieved by analogy, metaphor and what Pagden terms the ‘principle of attachment’ whereby an unfamiliar action can be attached to a familiar one, yet often in an altered context and with different motivations. European travellers in the Americas from Columbus to Humboldt have used this principle of attachment in order to recognise, take possession and bring the ‘new world’ back to the ‘old’. Nor were European representations of indigenous peoples simply negative and triumphalist. There has been a polarisation of images of indigenous society in historians’ and travellers’ accounts. Huhne’s examination of Williams’ and Lewis’ Early Images of the Americas reveals that two genres of depicting indigenous peoples were firmly entrenched early on in the colonisation of the ‘New World’; Gonzalo Oviedo’s depiction of bestial

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savages and Bartolome de Las Casas’ utopian representations of indigenous society. Whereas the former pre-empted a Hobbesian view of non-Western peoples, the latter could be seen as the precursor to an enduring Romantic genre of the noble American savage epitomised in the writings of eighteenthcentury French authors such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu. In modernist texts on Latin American identities, John Watanabe finds these twin genres of tragedy or romance in texts of travel writers and anthropologists among Mayan peoples-in the intrepid explorer Stephen’s retrograde savages or the anthropologist Redfield’s noble descendants of Classic Maya civilisation. These ‘orientalist’ genres are not only confined to texts for Western intellectual consumption, but have a wider saliency. In Watanabe’s description of everyday practices and values of racism between Ladinos and Mayan peoples of Guatemala, the legacy of these polarised European images continues in a dynamic form. CULTURES

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If those who followed Columbus also came with his preconceptions (as many of them did), for them the walls quickly crumbled; former boundaries became dynamic moving frontiers (McLean, 1992: 7). Despite the cultural distancing which some identity frameworks overtly encouraged, collective identities interact over time in shifting and heterogeneous social spaces, resulting in countervailing processes of hybridisation. Complete incommensurability between societies, whether posited to construct European claims to superiority (Oviedo, 1535) or recognise cultural pluralism (Pagden, 1993), ignores the local and global interconnections which have shaped American and European identities for centuries. Radical forms of cultural relativism are predicated upon a myth of isolation which neglects the relational attributes of identities and the historical dimensions of collective creative refashionings. As we see in many of the contributions, the globalisation of culture is not just a nineteenth- or twentieth-century phenomenon. Inseparable from the rhetorics of exclusion, there has been an undeniable historical interplay of diverse identities within and between all ethnic groups in Latin America. As Paul Gilroy (1993: 2) writes, ‘the reflexive cultures and consciousnesses of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the Indians they slaughtered and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other’. These negotiations of identity are perennially ambiguous, contingent and shot through with ironies. The seemingly contradictory processes of othering and hybridisation are constitutive of each other, dynamically feeding into one another. Identities become interior to each other and implicitly influence the emergence of new identities. This applies as much to ‘Western’ identities as those considered ‘non-Western’, thus challenging the entrenched assumption that only European cultures (and their colonial offshoots) are capable of changing without a concomitant loss of ‘authenticity’. The relational and historical nature of cultural identity means that all social

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groups have to manage more than one tradition. Traversing several cultures at once, societies must sail in many seas simultaneously. This can lead to an uncomfortable predicament of legitimacy, a prevalent lack of confidence. This is not just the product of the Spanish invasion, but is linked to prior processes as well. Pre-invasion states also interfered with traditional loyalties by demanding labour obligations; for instance, Aztec Tenochtitlan demanded fequitl tribute from peasant communities and the Inkas posted mituyos and yunaconas around the far-flung comers of the empire, partly in order to diminish their local ethnic affiliations. The Spanish invasion, far from being the beginning of a global process of cultural homogenisation which is eradicating difference, has resulted in a heightened patterning of cultural diversity where all become more aware of how they are different (Hannerz, 1992). Sergio Bellei writing on twentieth-century Brazil refers to a pervasive uncertainty about cultural identity, describing feelings of ‘cultural embarrassment’. This inauthenticity is the atmosphere of the frontier, ‘between the powerful and the dispossessed’, which local cultures inhabit. This continual balancing act has led to a decentred culture of mediation. Bellei refers to ‘Brazilian cultural cannibalism or a devouring of the foreign and the exalting of both miscegenation and all that is European. Mediation is inherently contradictory, being both undermining of identities and yet a way of untangling cultural contradictions. This is apparent in Bellei’s ambivalence when he sees mediation as a ‘panacea’ which could be poisonous or a healthy medicine for cultural autonomy. Faced with cultural uncertainty, some Latin American authors such as Sarmiento have pursued cultural revitalisation and collective refashioning. They reformulate the representations which others have made for them in a bid to forge new cultural origins. John Watanabe’s description of Mayan cultures as in ‘limbo’ resembles Bellei’s observations in Brazil; ‘they now exist at the juncture of their own self-ascribed, if constantly emerging, assumptions about who and what they are and the attributes imputed to them by others’. In Guatemala, ethnic relations have taken a new turn as Maya intellectuals respond to generalised state terror in the 1980s with a programme of ethnic revivalism. Across Latin America, indigenous associations increasingly seek to resolve the paradoxes of liminality through cultural revitalisation. This shift is manifestly expressed in the political transformation of 1992 Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchti from the late 1970s to the 1990s. Her public discourse has shifted from promoting a Third World nationalist socialism to deploying the language of Mayan ethnic revivalism. Cultural uncertainty is a prevalent feature in the history of mestizo and indigenous literature in Latin America. Martin Lienhard’s two books La voz y su Huella and Testimonies, cartas and manifiestos indtgenus, reviewed by William Rowe, furnish an archaeology of indo-mestizo writing from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Indigenous and mestizo cultures have produced literatures which have been rendered invisible by Eurocentric distinctions of what is and is not literature. Conventional literary distinctions have ignored cultural diglossia-a double vision against a double background. This hybridised literature is in a political sense both subversive in its

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reshaping of the dominant language, yet compromised by its need to negotiate with the communicative technology of colonial power. These dimensions of identity are not particular to the context of Latin America but are prevalent in a diversity of colonial and post-colonial experiences. Paul Gilroy (1993) describes remarkably similar sentiments in his use of W. E. B. Du Bois’ idea of ‘double consciousness’ to develop the concept of a ‘black Atlantic’. Referring to a different context from the one we are concerned with here-that is emergent black identities and culturesGilroy (p. 3) captures well the stresses ‘involved in trying to face (at least) two ways at once’. It is important to stress at this point that European identities are just as problematic as those of indigenous or black societies in America. This is apparent in the early modem period from the upheavals caused by the introduction of the idea of alien peoples of America into European thinking, and in the shifting attitudes to alien cultures over 300 years explored in Pagden (1993). The alarm of the French authorities on reading a message left by a deserter from La Salle’s party as he vanished into the forest, ‘Nous sommes touts [sic] sauvages’, attests to a deep fear of the seductiveness of the nonWestern ‘savage’ (Elliott 1993: 39). Double consciousness is therefore not confined to the subaltern, but is also part of the experiences of Westerners in colonial contexts. James Clifford (1988) has written well about the parallels between Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the personal diary of the first modern ethnographer, Bronislav Malinowski. Both texts chart the disintegration of a sense of self as a Western identity is overwhelmed in a non-Western context. Malinowski even reacts to the threat from the Trobrianders to the coherence of his personality by repeating Kurtz’s words, ‘Exterminate the brutes’ (Clifford, 1988: 105). The desire to define a modern ‘Western’ identity continues to be a predicament and is evinced in the increasing representation of indigenous peoples in films such as Emerald Forest, The Mission and the spate of Columbus films in 1992 (cf. Wilson, n.d.). The enduring repetition of many of the same myths originally constructed in the sixteenth century indicates a persistent uncertainty about modern Western identities (though obviously for different reasons now than then). IDENTITY AS A PARADOX So far in this introduction, I have considered two paradigms of identity; one which confidently asserts separation and incommensurability and another which more cautiously recognises cultural intermixture and the double consciousness of relational identities. They seem to be contradictory, but here I would like to juxtapose them together in a way that shows their mutual dependence and interrelatedness. These are recurring patterns of identification which are constitutive of each other and imply each other. Discourses on identity swing like a pendulum between closure and openness, between an absolutist sense of difference and an awareness of double consciousness. Both are responses to the irresolvability of identity, emerging as strategies to cope with its inherently insecure ontology. Identity is a special type of subjectivity which is predicated to a large degree on ideas of difference and an

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awareness of boundaries. These digital conceptions of exclusivity can never be realised in practice, since hybridity, cultural borrowings and mutual influences result from the ethnic relationships themselves. This is one contradiction of identity; that is, that relationality must be present for identity to exist, but the very basis of meaning in difference leads to the crossing-over of signifiers and the underminin g of any pretentions to boundedness. Identity is better seen as a paradox rather than a statement; one which blurs and dissolves as soon as it is confidently asserted. For an identity to be maintained, it must constantly repress the existence of everyday cultural interchanges, especially in absolutist discourses which we could see as the ‘false consciousness’ of social classificatory processes. These rely on a psychology of denial to arbitrarily separate that which is inextricably interlinked. I would add two provisos to my claim that overt discourses on identity swing between the poles of absolutism and, to a much lesser extent, an awareness of double consciousness. First of all, these are higher order tendencies or hegemonic discourses, but they always operate in a context of heterogeneity, contradiction and slippage. Secondly, they are not given universal forms; ethnic absolutism or double consciousness are not the same everywhere, not even when repeated at different times in the same context. We must pay a great deal of attention to the ways in which classificatory discourses are the product of particular historical transformations, and how certain narratives are constrained or compelled by prior events and transforming consciousnesses. Owing to the widespread view that identity is relational and therefore the signs of identity are arbitrary, there has been a great deal of resistance to granting a determining role to the past and notions of continuity and tradition, especially since this chimes with discourses of ethnic and nationalist absolutism. Still, it is important to chart how one narrative implies and necessitates another. For instance, foreign researchers in Guatemala and local Mayan intellectuals are seeking to understand Mayan identities in terms of Catholic and Protestant evangelisation, experiences of exile and civil war. Universalist discourses on class and religious identity have promoted a heightened interaction between global and local cultures on a scale unprecedented since the Spanish invasion. For many, they have enhanced liminal identities and double consciousness as never before. The failed narrative of class revolution has created the possibility for a new ethnic revivalism which has emanated primarily from urban Mayan intellectuals and professionals. This ‘revitalisation’ movement proposes essentialist ideas of continuity of tradition and encourages cultural segregation of Mayas and Ladinos, therefore engaging in the re-creation of those categories, and in certain cases its members advance an ethnic nationalism. This discourse was made possible by profound social traumas and cultural instability resulting from processes such as Protestant conversions, economic underdevelopment, and a racialised class war which left tens of thousands of Mayas and others dead. WRITING HISTORIES? To end on a reflexive note, the cultural revitalisation in many American indigenous communities raises questions about the ethics of writing

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indigenous histories and ethnographies. The practice of speaking for others cannot escape the new politics of emergence. James Clifford (1988: 7) is right to observe that: ‘The time is past when privileged authorities could routinely “give voice” (or history) to others without fear of contradiction.’ In a context where indigenous peoples. are demanding that their voices are heard unhindered by cultural mediators, what roles might there be for ethnographers, historians and editors of compilations of indigenous texts? Perhaps John Watanabe expresses most clearly the uncomfortable bind of being an outsider doing ethnography among indigenous peoples of the Americas. Yet anthropology seems to draw much of its rhetorical power from this partial perspective, this enforced marginality and the ‘double consciousness’ also inherent in ethnographic fieldwork (even in ethnography done ‘at home’). Watanabe explores the limitations of post-modernist criticism in resolving these tensions of ethnography. Post-modernism, in its urge to decentre dominant European discourses, can enhance the othering of the subject and marginalise local narratives. For their part, Mayan intellectuals are seeking to transcend traditional localism of a myriad of community and ethnic identities to formulate a pan-Maya identity. In so doing, they may develop a Mayan anthropology of the Maya, yet it remains to be seen if it will transcend the classic European genres of tragedy and romance. A related programme, shared by intellectuals of various communities, can be found in Olivia Harris’s call for a non-Eurocentric historiography which does not privilege the arrival of Europeans or exalt European periodisations of history. REFERENCES CASAS, BARTOLOME DE LAS (1965) Historias de las Indias, CARLO, A. M. (ed.), Fondo de Cultura Economica (Mexico City). CLIFFORD, J. (1988), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature andArt, Harvard University Press (Cambridge). ELLIOTT, J. H. (1993), ‘The Rediscovery of America’, New York Review ofBooks, 24 June. FROST, E. C. (1993), ‘Indians and theologians: sixteenth century Spanish theologians and their concepts of the indigenous soul’, in South and Meso-American Spirituality: From the Cult of the Serpent to the Theology ofliberation, GOSSEN, G. H. (ed.), SCM Press (London). GILROY, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Verso (London). HANNERZ, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, Columbia University Press (New York). HILL, J. S. (1988), Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past, University of Illinois (Urbana). OVIEDO, FERNANDEZ DE OVIEDO Y VALDES, GONZALO (1535/1959), Historia generaly natural de fas Zndias, Vols CXVI-CXXI, JUAN PEREZ DE TUDELA BUESO (ed.), Bibhoteca de autores espagnoles (Madrid). MCLEAN, I. (1992), ‘The circumference is everywhere and the centre is nowhere: modernity and the diasporic discovery of Columbus as told by Tzvetan Todorov’, Third Text 21: 5-10. PAGDEN, A. (1993) European Encounters with the New World: from Renaissance io Romanticism, Yale University Press (New Haven). TODAROV, T. (1984) The Conquest ofAmerica the Question of the Other, Harper and Row (New York). WILSON, R. (n.d.), ‘Desperately Seeking Savages: Film Images of Native America’.