Watching Avatar in La Paz

Last night I finally watched Avatar-- a pirated copy, dubbed in Spanish, obviously not 3D, which was perhaps not ideal but sort of fitting because this is the way people watch movies here. The film itself was pretty much how I thought it would be: nothing we haven't seen before in Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, The Matrix (far superior but nonetheless very influential) etc., although it was nice to see the U.S. army get its ass beat by the N'avi with help from the entire fancifully-animated ecosystem. I watched it with Luchi, who was was slightly more impressed than I was: as an artist she appreciated Cameron's world-building skills, but she was concerned with the "caudillismo" of Jake's call-to-arms (actually, I tried to convince her, it's far worse than caudillismo, because it's literally puppet caudillismo, why the fuck do they need a Northamerican soldier in a borrowed body to tell them how to resist? Yeah, THAT has ever really happened in the history of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare) and particularly, since she is also a farmer, with the material UNreality of the N'avi and their world. What do they eat? She kept asking. Yes, there were some sexy bow-and-arrow scenes, but the film never showed the people eating, much less gathering, harvesting, doing any sort of food-related ritual that would seem important for a community this "close to the land." She was also very concerned that Jake simply turned in his old dragon for a more prestigious model (in order to get the entire N'avi community to bow down to him in a pivotal scene) without a backward glance. Her critiques, then, were actually about Cameron's inability to imagine a community with an actually sustainable connection to the natural world, which is kind of interesting. It's the same focus on the concrete details of work that I got when I interviewed Bolivians about Peace Corps propaganda photos that showed volunteers doing allegedly universal "development work": but what are they actually doing? What are those crops they're growing? Are they going to market? It doesn't make sense that they would be selling crafts in that space., etc, questions that expose the ridiculousness of any universal development idea and of plopping 20 year-olds down in the middle of a community and ecosystem they don't know anything about, expecting them to use some kind of inborn American ingenuity to "develop" it--actually, sort of the ethos of Avatar too, though they do pointedly refuse any and all development interventions, which was nice.

Despite my predictable annoyance, I was interested in watching Avatar here, because the comparisons between the N'avi and Evo Morales have been ubiquitous: Evo has stood up to the U.S. government in significant ways, defending their connection to the natural world against, for example, the DEA's "coca eradication" programs and other neoliberal imperialist projects; and MAS' color is blue, following an interesting post-Cold War global color-reversal trend that perhaps signals the new new left's (or, as Arturo Escobar posits here, the new post-leftist, post-development, and above all anti-imperialist politic which is most fully elaborated by Bolivian indigenista social movement politics ) focus on nature that Cameron also grasped, perhaps the reason the film has been embraced by insurgents all over the world, despite their lack of a an ex-G.I. savior to lead them.

Evo himself went to see Avatar, in supposedly only the third movie-watching experience of his life, and commented that "the film contains a high degree of fantasy, but is at the same time a profound depiction of resistance against capitalism and the fight to defend the natural world."

Evo is right that the film critiques the continued insistence that Bolivia "modernize" no matter what the cost to its land and people, by even liberal U.S. voices: a recent New Yorker article by Lawrence Wright on the possibilities of extracting lithium in Bolivia condescendingly calls Evo "a creature of his biography" with "a mystical attachment to coca," calls Evo's attempts at a social welfare state "out of date," and quotes an opponent (one of an overwhelming number quoted in the article) saying "Evo is Aymara, and the Aymara see the world as a fight between good and evil, like 'Star Wars.' For him, the forces of good are coca growers and the coca leaf. The evil is the D.E.A. and the U.S." It's worth noting that a) Bolivia is not the country that formulated either star wars or ANY of the manichean "you're with us or against us" justifications for pre-emptive war that define the era of U.S. hegemony; but that b) Evo was nearly beaten to death by D.E.A.-affiliated Bolivian troops for his work in the coca-growers union, so the shoe kind of fits here. See this excellent article by Suzanna Reiss to learn about how the Obama administration is, if anything, exacerbating the entirely imperialist--i.e. concerned much more with governments' attempts to hold onto and redistribute their resources than with stemming drug distribution and consumption--drug war.

Anyway, the New Yorker article: Wright refuses to budge an inch from the developmentalist paradigm, lamenting Bolivia's failure to emerge from its "pre-industrial cocoon"; worries openly that now that Evo has expelled the DEA, that "the drug trade" will "corrupt Bolivian society"; and, in perhaps the most disgusting and libelous move of the article, characterizes the entire cycle of anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal uprisings of the early and mid 2000s as about silly age-old anti-Chilean hostilities. Nothing could be further from the truth: the vast majority of Bolivians are attempting to reject neoliberal capitalism on purpose, in order to (re)conceptualize ways of life not based on modernization, endless accumulation, and environmental destruction. At least James Cameron gets that.

Appropriation and Spirituality, Part III

These are pictures from a few weeks ago when we found this pacheta, which is a sacred hill or mountain. Often in Bolivia the colonizers would come in and put churches on top of pachetas on purpose. We found this one on Helena's last day, when we were supposed to be driving to look at colonial art and Silvia said, Wait, I think it's a Pacheta! and swerved off the road and started driving up this hill, where there were indeed sacred rocks, which we knew because they were shaped like animals (see the one above that looks remarkably like a frog.) So we made offerings there (threw alcohol around and burned some stuff). As we did the offerings, I did feel this incredible gratitude for all the people in my life and even for the world (or maybe the earth) in a general sense, a feeling I never have and am politically opposed to because the world is so fucked up and unequal that I've always felt that expressing gratitude for what I have would be tantamount to an endorsement of the geopolitical order. It was strange--I wouldn't say I'm a convert, but I have wished on the shrine a few times since then.

Afterward, we went to this festival, which was really beautiful. Silvia knew some people in the town, so everyone was extremely friendly to us and kept bringing us beer. The men in the drum circle were flirting with Silvia until she said "soy hombre-mujer" in Aymara. Which I thought was a cool way to shut them down. As we participated, she trained me and Helena in Aymara etiquette, which mostly consists of a lot of reciprocity: you always accept drinks from other people, and if you don't want it you throw it on the ground, to the pachamama; you always serve other people; you thank every person at the table after eating, etc. These things can sometimes be time-consuming, but they do create a certain amount of affection and community, which is nice. (Note also the 40s, which are very respectable here, so much so that Helena walked through a fancy museum carrying on and nobody batted an eye.)

I'm posting these old photos because my adventures have been basically the same as the aforementioned ones (writing, translating, being stymied at archives, cooking with Silvia, hanging out with the collective, occasionally going out dancing until 5AM and being exhausted for the next few days), I figured it was as good a time as any to continue our discussion about Indigeneity and appropriation. To help us out, here is an excerpt from the article I translated for Silvia, which is supposed to be published in the awesome-looking cultural studies journal Qui Parle ( http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~quiparle/ --they are supposed to give me the credit and pay me, but I haven't heard anything, so who knows) :

At the end of the nineteenth century the renowned liberal historian Gabriel René Moreno already celebrated this fate, imagining the Andean Indians pushed toward dissolution by the progressive impulse embodied in the elite entrepreneurs and landlords. Rough versions of the same fantasies cloud the vision of today’s elites and prevent them from seeing that Bolivia will be a colonial country as long as the dominant classes continue to be colonized, and as long as the mestizo, educated sectors do not proudly reaffirm their own cultural difference and establish equal and dialogic relations with the Indian cultures that inhabit the national territory.

This is interesting for several reasons. One (this probably will not interest others quite so much) is that it spurred Silvia to ask me to translate, because the original translator was so bad that he thought Gabriel Rene Moreno was a singer, translating her metaphor (she said he was "cantando" about the disappearance of the Indian, meaning celebrating or proclaiming) literally and not bothering to look anything up, even though he's like the most famous 19th century historian in Bolivia.

The other interesting thing about the passage is that she's talking, as she often does, about the idea of mestizos reappropriating their indigenous heritage. To me it seems like there are lots of ways that this strategy could go horribly wrong, from boston tea-party/minstrelsy-type adoption of Indian-face to act out; to the more enfranchised groups' packaging of Native cultures for the global marketplace without addressing the economic circumstances of the groups that have always been Indios; to the citing of Native traditions/orthodoxy to justify the oppression of women and gay people (not that the colonial/liberal/neoliberal culture is any better, but still). But it's really interesting, I think, this effort to make white and mestizo Bolivians substantively re-adopt their indigenous heritage. Generally Silvia celebrates this, even if the reclamation of indigenous heritage takes the form of consumption practices--of coca, for example. But it's possible that it's different when the whole country, even the elites, have suffered from tremendous colonial oppression, and other ideologies that might free them like Marxism have their roots in the same Europeans who created the systems in the first place and are quite racist besides, constructing them as "pre-capitalist" as if you have to go through capitalism. Then I guess indigenous traditions, particularly those of community and resistance, become something important to be mobilized against all the imperialist ideologies and systems. Though I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it would mean at an executive/ legislative level to indigenize the population. It would be nice if Evo gets a big mandate this november and actually uses it (unlike some other presidents I can think of), and I get to see the change in person.

Working

I spent much of the week (well, two long evenings and one long lunch) translating for these two European guys, Stefan and Merlin, who are on vacation and somehow found Silvia. But she is out of town, so Stefan, a German art-world person of some kind, wanted to talk with Eduardo and Marco about the collective and the political situation in Bolivia more generally. Merlin, Stefan's friend (Partner? Travel companion? They were both minimally expressive, so it was hard to tell), with very long blond hair and as Eduardo said, "de cara loca," barely talked at all. But they were clearly both hardcore Marxists and this looking-for-indigenous-resistance-in-paintings-and-festivals stuff wasn't really working for them. But we talked a LOT about the church, Evo, whether there is a sub-proletariat (which Stefan seemed fairly sure was a real term that people use but I just don't know: Subaltern? Lumpen proletariat?) in South America; the significance of the coca circuits; the campaign to legalize coca and what it could do to the economy; and lots of other things that I'm incapable of translating very coherently.

In any case, I was very excited to actually do a job for the collective, especially since they've taken me on all these adventures and insisted on paying for everything, and I did learn a lot about the current situation in Bolivia. Marco and Eduardo are fairly pessimistic that Evo is actually going to bring substantive changes to Bolivia. Basically, they said, it's neoliberalism with a new national self-confidence and slightly more of a social safety net: he is not going to really expropriate the natural resources or implement substantive land reform or even put radical indigenous people in positions of real power. He, like Obama, is really into cross-class unity. They explained that there was a really radical indigenous leader who talked about indigenizing the entire Bolivian population, but that he was pushed aside to make way for Evo. It was really interesting, but also extremely sad. I mean, I know Evo is not Obama, but to hear that they don't think he has, can, or will make real structural changes here was really depressing.

On the bright side, today I made pesto; Silvina taught me how to grind it outside with a big stone, which was pretty cool.

When I haven't been translating for the crazy-faced Europeans or making pesto with big rocks, I've been working at the Archives of Foreign Relations. It's a bit crazy: no one except the young assistant seems to know anything; it's freezing cold; most of the lights only work for a few hours a day so we are researching in semi darkness; there is only one table, which is nice and communal but sometimes gets crazy; they leave us alone with the documents all the time; and documents from entire years are missing. (I learned, talking to Lucia and Fernando one night this week, that basically all the documents from the dictatorship years have been destroyed. But they are really wonderful to me now that I worked in their fields for an entire day, and they gave me all these ideas.) Also, there was a guy putting together a shelf today, drilling and hammering pretty much all day right next to the research table.

I realize these are bourgeois complaints, except maybe the one about the missing documents. On the bright side, the archivists are really friendly: after meeting them once, we now have to kiss hello every day.

I am almost done there, due to all the missing documents. Next week Eduardo is going to take me to this other archive that he says is very nice and friendly. He got a bit weird when he found out my work was about masculinity (so much so that I thought maybe we weren't going be friends anymore and was very sad, but I think things are okay now), so then when he was explaining about the archive, he was like, "There's really a sense of fraternidad, uh, em, comunidad." Then I also have to go to the place Lucia and Fernando were telling me about, which is this small archive run by old radicals who are very supportive of people who want to reconstruct and think about the dictatorship years.