CLACS Blog

kirchner, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Argentina just had elections this past Sunday, which resulted in a significant loss of power for the Kirchners. This is significant for my project because, as I have been realizing over these past few weeks, human rights projects here are tied to politics in a way that makes them vulnerable to shifts in popularity and power experienced by their political allies. The Kirchners have used human rights as a main component of their platform since assuming power six years ago. Since then various groups, such as the Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, have accepted both their money and support. This has proven both beneficial and complicated. Some members of Argentine society perceive alliances between politicians and human rights organizations as merely a strategy to gain sympathy and/or popularity while pursuing a less heartwarming agenda behind the scenes. Others see a partnership between the Kirchners and various human rights organizations as natural and beneficial to the causes promoted by these organizations. Either way, a shift in power to politicians who are less inclined to support a human rights agenda raises the issue of how these organizations will fare without the benefit of political allies.

As I wrap up my time here in Buenos Aires I am both grateful to all of the people who have been so generous with their time and resources and sad to be leaving with so many questions left to explore. I have been lucky enough to have spent time with a variety of people, from representatives of human rights organizations such as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and HIJOS, to the Defensora del Pueblo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. I've even had some extremely interesting conversations with several taxi drivers.

One challenging aspect of studying collective memory is trying to define what comprises the actual collectivity, and how to measure or gauge its various memories. This challenge has also opened up various new ways of thinking about the human rights movement here in Argentina, and the impulse to memorialize the violence of the last dictatorship. Who the repression of that era affected, or continues to affect, is in and of itself, a tricky question to answer. I have struggled to understand how so many Argentines exclude themselves from memory of the dictatorship based on their sense that it has no bearing on their lives, or that of their loved ones. I've only begun to explore this aspect of collective memory, and will sadly not be able to pursue it in person, but I know that it has important implications for my project as a whole.

Lasater_Amy_Peru_June30, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Today is my last full day in Cuzco (and Peru, for that matter) and I’m trying to piece together everything that I’ve seen over the past month and a half. One of the objectives that I had had going into these six weeks was to get a better sense of the ways that Peru’s coast and mountain regions interact with each other in the articulation of national identity, and going from Lima to Cuzco with that specific goal in mind was definitely an eye-opening experience, although I’m still trying to determine to what extent I’m seeing only the contrasts that I want to see.

One of the highlights of my trip has been the festival of Inti Raymi, which I attended on June 24. I had read a lot about Inti Raymi (the “Fiesta del Sol” -- or “Sun Party!” -- as it is translated on a poster attempting to attract tourists to a rave), but I had never actually seen it. It’s an invented tradition, a supposed Inca ritual that actually started in the 1950s, but now tourists from all over the country and world come to see the “traditional” Inca dances and ceremonies, accompanied by a narration entirely in Quechua. (To my disappointment, this narration was not very well amplified and thus hardly intelligible, but since most of the audience doesn’t speak Quechua anyway, I suspect that the referential content of the words was not really the point.)

I was pleased to finally see exactly what goes on during Inti Raymi – the dances, the “llama sacrifice,” the pouring of chicha onto an altar – but what was far more interesting turned out to be the fact that the semiotic vocabulary of the ceremony extended to much of the activity that occurred both before and after June 24 itself. The days leading up to Inti Raymi are the “Fiestas del Qosqo,” and the parades that go on during that day are accompanied by the constant refrain of Inti Raymi: “Kawsachun Qosqo!” [Make Cuzco live!] Even apart from these official parades, though, I saw two other parades in the square this week that deliberately echoed the official events to make very different points about the city. On the day I arrived here, a group of campesinos marched the in square in a direct echo of the official, celebratory parades, emphasizing the fact that many of the descendents of the Incas (as opposed to the costumed dancers who normally occupy the middle or upper classes here) are being ignored by the government and thus have no cause to celebrate. Later in the week, I saw a parade that used the refrain “Kawsachun Christo!” to emphasize Cuzco’s religious identity (although, by using the Quechua phrase, they were obviously linking Christianity to the Inca past, something I’ve explicitly heard many tour guides in the churches do as well).

Having timed my visit here for Inti Raymi, I’m leaving Cuzco with the sense that the city has a very regionally-focused identity, while the events I attended in Lima tended to have a much more national scope (even if that scope sometimes framed non-limeños as worthy of charity or pity). That said, I know from my past experience in Cuzco that this week has contained an anomalous amount of collective effervesence, so I’m planning to look at my notes from this year in combination from my thoughts from last year.

Vazquez-Rojas_Mexico070509, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

My four-week stay in the Tarascan area is now over. I was able to find answers to some questions, but as in every productive investigation, I was left with more open puzzles than questions solved. For instance, I corroborated that a nominal phrase in the plural form is always interpreted independently on the interpretation of other operators in the sentence. In that respect, Tarascan plurals are different from English plurals and Spanish plurals. I also realized, as I posted before, that the Tarascan language categorizes differently certain aspects of the surrounding world. For instance, in Tarascan one cannot count things like avocadoes. The strict correlate of the English expression “three avocadoes” is not possible in this language. To express this concept, a Tarascan speaker would say something like “Three round-pieces-of avocado”. The expression corresponding to “round-pieces-of” (irhákwa) is called a Classifier.

Tarascan has at least two classifiers, expressions that divide a homogeneous mass into countable parts. The choice of the classifier depends on the form of the countable units that one wants to divide up from the mass concept. There is a classifier for round things, irhákwa and another one for elongated pieces (the one used to count thinks like ‘tortilla’ or ‘corn’): ichákwa. A good question now is if the similarity between these two words motivates partitioning them into different morphemes, which in turn would entail that irhakwa and ichakwa are complex expressions composed by multiple units of meaning.

Classifiers in languages like Tarascan are crucial in the understanding of plurals, because usually a language that has classifiers does not need to have plural morphology. For instance, Chinese languages have classifiers but do not have plural morphemes. Our most common Indoeuropean languages have plural morphemes, but no classifiers. It has been said that languages have either one or the other because classifiers and plurals serve the same function of making groups of individuated objects. Yet, Tarascan has both of them, an unexpected fact under some assumed typological predictions. The presence of plural morphology and classifiers not only in the same language, but also in the same sentence, is a striking fact and its explanation will definitely call into question some current theories about the cross-linguistic meaning of plural morphology.

The fieldwork stage of the project is now over and now I am devoted to analyzing the data that I gathered on the face of the predictions made by current theories on the semantics of plurals. I am really grateful to CLACS-NYU, the researchers at UNAM with whom I had the opportunity to talk (Cristina Buenrostro, Samuel Herrera, Lucero Meléndez and Rodrigo Romero) and my consultants (Saulina Ascencio, Camerina García, Santiago Marcelino and Juan Bautista) for having made of this research period a wonderful academic and personal experience.

Hayman_Uruguay_07.09, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

On June 26 and 27, the anniversary of the 1973 golpe de estado in Uruguay, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a conference held by the Asociación Psicoanalitica Uruguaya (APU). Entitled “Hacer Memoria”, the weekend-long event that included panel discussions and workshops by important Uruguayan memory scholars, historians, writers, and psychoanalysts such as Maren and Marcelo Viñar, Carina Blixen, Victor Guerra, Alvaro Rico and Daniel Gil. The conference opened with a showing of Mateo Gutiérrez’s documentary “D.F.” (Destino Final), which tells the story of his father’s kidnapping and murder in Buenos Aires in 1976 along with Senator Zelmar Michelini and the young Tupamaro couple William Whitelaw and Rosario Barredo (all Uruguayan citizens living in exile). Twenty years later, Madres y Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos held the first annual March of Memory in Montevideo to commemorate the deaths of the four Uruguayans and remember those who disappeared during the dictatorship. Filmmaker and historian Virginia Martinez, whose documentaries Por Esos Ojos and Memorias de Mujeres I greatly admire, helped facilitate the panel discussion afterward.
Although psychoanalysis has no direct connection to my project, the APU conference was designed to facilitate dialogue about memory, subjectivity and literature across different disciplines. I was able to meet several interesting people at the conference, including playwright and scholar Roger Mirza and Marisa Bukasr of “Memoria en Libertad”, a group founded by the children of the disappeared in Montevideo. I hope to speak to them in the coming weeks about their work.
Along with the conference and a number of interviews, the last two weeks have involved a serious re-assessment of my project on the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law) in an attempt to take full advantage of my last month in Montevideo. Well into my research, I am forced to recognize my aversion to contacting politicians and members of the Uruguayan armed forces – and more than anything, my aversion to contacting former known torturers -- to ask them about their opposition to the annulment of the Ley de Caducidad. I realize that journalistic “objectivity” demands that I seek out adversarial perspectives on the law, but I find it impossible treat this project as a debate between two equally valid points of view, and I also recognize time constraints that will keep me from fully absorbing the 20 year’s worth of literature written on the topic. I’ve finally decided to reject the idea of seeking out former oppressors for a wide variety of reasons, both personal and professional, but have made up a list of politicians and civilians opposed to annulling the Ley de Caducidad whose perspectives I hope will inform and enhance my journalistic project. As far as my Master’s thesis for CLACS is concerned, I am now concentrating on a single phenomenon, which is the conversion of the Penal de Punta Carretas into a shopping center in 1994. I expect to mention the referendum on the Ley de Caducidad in this project, but only as part of the greater debate on memory in Uruguay.

Mladic_Peru_071409, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Cusco. My name is Christine, and I will be in Cusco for 2 months to study the Quechua language. Along with three other classmates from New York, I am studying at Centro Tinku, a language school that is about a 5-minute walk from the Plaza de Armas. In addition to this intensive program, I am also planning to research photography in Peru for my master’s project. My intention is to explore the many ways that photography may be used in and around Calca, a small town about an hour drive outside of Cusco in the Sacred Valley.

While all four of us from NYU passed the evaluation into the intermediate level, all 10 of us in the class have had a different experience in learning the language. Even though our professor in New York is a native speaker from Cusco, it is incredibly challenging to attempt to converse with Quechua speakers outside of a classroom setting. One of the benefits of studying Quechua in Cusco is the countless opportunities we have to practice. Participating in a homestay, I have the advantage of chatting with my Señora in Quechua over a mate de coca or while learning a new recipe. Quechua speaking taxi drivers, waiters and sellers in the market have generally seemed willing to see how this gringa fares: I would say that I know that I have a lot of learning ahead of me, and I’m excited to have so many chances to actually use the language on a daily basis.

We are now in our second week of classes, and I finally feel like I may have a grip on being here. The first week was intense, to say the least: adjusting to life with a family as part of a homestay, battling stomach complications due to new food and bacteria, fighting off colds and the flu during these frigid winter nights, trying to wrap my head around a new language. I had hoped to be able to start research in Calca almost immediately, but I see that I needed this week to get settled. In addition to the challenges listed above, Peru is also in a time of political discontentment. Last week classes were cancelled one day due to a potential national strike, and today (8 July) Cusco participated in an organized, national strike. To see photos from the strike, visit my flickr site.

Stay tuned for more…

Salazar_Peru_071709, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Between the years of 1980 and 2000 more than 60,000 Peruvians were murdered and/or disappeared as a result of a bloody internal war started by the guerrilla movement Shining Path. My current research is focused on the testimonials collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission given by women affected by the conflict. The main objective of my research project is to explore the crossings between gender and violence in the personal narratives of Peruvian women after those years of terror.
Since my arrival to Lima, I have conducted research at the holdings of Centro de Documentación para la memoria colectiva (Lima, Peru) consulting the transcriptions of thousands of testimonials given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This Archive holds more than 16,000 testimonials and is organized by geographical location, so I decided to focus on the areas most affected by the conflict as Ayacucho, Apurimac and Huancavelica.

This part of my research has revealed some perverted gender relations during the conflict. The bodies of the Peruvian women were used as a battle camp not just by the Shining Path but also by the Peruvian Army which was supposed to protect the population. In my final report, I will present some of the techniques used by the Shining Path and the Army to develop a strategy of terror.

The next weeks I will continue the research at the Centro de Información, visit the photographic exhibition Yuyanapaq located at the National Museum, and also research some periodical publications at the National Library. The objective of this section will be to explore the configuration of the politics of memory in Peru.

Cokelet_Mexico_071709, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Greetings from Mexico City. As I write this, my first blog entry, at 7 a.m., from a 10th story apartment overlooking a sunny but smoggy city, I am again reminded of perhaps Mexico’s most telling statistic: 70% of the population is moderately or extremely poor. Combined with another telling figure – nine Mexicans figure in Forbes Magazine’s latest listing of the world’s billionaires – I cannot help but notice that the wage gap, economic inequality, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few continue to characterize (if not at least partially determine) Mexico’s development. Outside my window hundreds of market vendors, domestic workers, microbus drivers, and other laborers stream in and out of Metro Chapultepec on their way to conform the country’s informal sector, which numbers 30 million people or two-thirds of working adults. Behind them, in the distance, loom the high-rise office buildings of Polanco and Santa Fe, where the most fortunate of the other one-third (the 15 million who comprise the formal economy) arrive to work in chauffeured SUVs and, in some extreme cases, private helicopters. This contradiction, the disparity between the haves and have nots, certainly motivated me to spend a few weeks this summer trying to get to the bottom of how Mexico’s elite had its cake and ate it too and, ultimately, how this bodes for democracy and development.

I arrived in Mexico City in late May after delaying my trip due to the H1N1 pandemic. Over the past month and a half I have coordinated a research project for U.S. and Mexican human and labor rights organizations about the economic and social composition of the service sector in the Distrito Federal. Though certainly a positive and productive experience, this research has occupied a good deal of my time and energy. Thanks to the generosity of the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation, I spent an unforgettable two weeks in South Africa as a student delegate to the Academy of Achievement, from which I returned jet-lagged though happy this past weekend. And finally this week I’ve managed to focus my energies on research that I hope will become my Master’s thesis: the origin, development, and scope of Mexico’s most influential albeit hermetic group of business leaders, the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocio (Mexican Council of Businessmen, or CMHN).

The original 12 members of the CMHN, founded in 1962, with certain additions, subtractions, and generational renewal, today still comprise a decisive bloc within the organization and Mexican society as a whole, advising successive presidential sexenios, sitting on the boards of directors of each other’s corporations, intermarrying and solidifying their power, and many would argue exercising virtual veto power over the country’s economic and political apparatus. Initially my plan this summer was to conduct individual interviews with members of the CMHN and those who know them so as to construct a historical narrative of the organization and a working database of potential variables for subsequent analysis. However, I believe my time will be most productive focusing on documentary collection and the narrative structure of my research. That way I’ll be better informed and prepared when I conduct my interviews.

So, back to the archives for me and, until next time, congratulations and best of luck to all fellow grant recipients.

1. The World Bank. (2005). “Income Generation and Social Protection for the Poor.” 2010 projections.

Colijn_Peru_072009, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

Hello from Cuzco, Peru! I´ve been here for a few weeks now and it´s been somewhat of an adjustment to life here, as it´s my first time in Peru. Along with working on research for my MA project, I´m in an intensive Quechua language course along with two other students from NYU. We take taxis or buses to school or do the hour-long walk when we´re not fighting off illness due to the variety of things that have befallen us here. Trying to get research done has also been somewhat challenging, due to periodic strikes, threatened strikes, or closing (public) school due to the H1N1 flu. My research focus involves bilingual education between Quechua and Spanish, so having the schools closed for two or three weeks doesn´t help, even though it´s certainly a good reason to close school.

This past Sunday the class from our Quechua program went to a small town called Combapata about two hours outside of Cuzco. We visited the two markets they had: the animal and the "stuff" market. The animal market pictured above had mostly cows left by the time we got there. The "stuff" market, on the other hand, was selling everything from fruits and vegetables, guinea pigs and baby chicks, hand-made sweaters and scarves, to cell phones and pirated dvds and cds. We walked through the animal market, drawing lots of stares, as the five of us walking together were quite definitely the only gringos anywhere nearby. We stopped to speak to two vendors selling grapes, and wound up getting to practice speaking some Quechua with them. They asked questions like where we were from, what we were doing in Peru and in Combapata, and were pretty interested in our relationship statuses. They seemed somewhat surprised that none of us had any kids, and asked the couple we had with us if they didn´t have kids because they couldn´t have kids. By the end of the conversation, a crowd of at least 15 or 20 people had gathered to watch the gringos trying to speak Quechua.

We also attended a Catholic mass conducted almost entirely in Quechua. Interestingly, the priest was originally from New Zealand, and had been taught Quechua by one of the teachers in our school in Cuzco. We drew some stares in mass as well, but managed to follow some of the service. It´s definitely not easy to pick out the few words you know from a running stream of religious-oriented speech. According to our Quechua teacher, the priest didn´t have a very good Quechua accent, but it was likely a little easier for us to understand, as it was closer to our own gringo-accented Quechua. Some of the church members and vendors in the market, like the two people selling grapes, were fairly willing to speak Quechua with us, though they spoke Spanish as well. Some of the vendors just shook their heads, said no, or said they didn´t speak Quechua if we asked if they would be willing to speak Quechua with us. That seems to be fairly common in the places that we´ve visited thus far. At least one member of the families that we live with speaks Quechua and is happy to practice with us, but some vendors have no interest whatsoever in speaking in or about Quechua, at least with foreigners.

Our Quechua professor from NYU arrived in Cuzco yesterday. He´s from Calca, a town about 45 minutes or an hour outside of Cuzco, and has invited his students that are here in Cuzco to have lunch with his family in Calca and plans to show us around town and introduce us to people. This should open some doors as far as research goes, and will afford some great opportunities to use Quechua with our professor, his family and other friends around town, so the rest of my time here in Cuzco should be pretty interesting. Good luck to all the rest of the summer travelers!

Zeichner_Brazil_072109, originally uploaded by CLACS - NYU.

During my final weeks in Brazil, the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, broke the story that retired coronel Sebastião Curió, the military official who was in charge of the campaign against the Araguaia guerilla movement from 1972-75, would now, after over 30 years of silence, allow a reporter to review his personal archives, as well as give his own public reflections on the barbarous role the military played during these events. In the days that followed the news story, interest in finding and reopening archival sources from the military dictatorship (1964-1985) became a hot political issue. As a historian, just the thought of gaining access to certain documents produced by certain branches was tantalizing, however, to be perfectly honest, somewhat difficult to imagine. The most useful documents I worked with this time, came from information compiled by the State Political Police divisions (DEOPS/DOPS) from 1964 to 1982. As one of the principal arms of state repression and executors of torture, the documents created by the DEOPS/DOPS forces are, in certain ways, treasure troves of useful information. However, the history behind the opening of DEOPS/DOPS collections is, sadly, one of very few victories. Today, thanks to the hard work and determination of several important activists, the Sao Paulo DEOPS/DOPS collection is almost completely open to the public. However, while the work in Sao Paulo has been successful, efforts in many other states were not. It is also notable that the State Political Police was not the only government agency used by the generals to terrorize the nation. Today, the Lula government continues to restrict the public’s access to research of national security documents. It is interesting to note that after the story of Curió’s intention to allow his personal archives to be reviewed broke, many of the individuals I interviewed on this trip, some of who had previously thought differently, voiced their desire to request their own documents. Now in their sixties and seventies, I spoke with individuals who were excited that I was interested in the history of those who considered themselves the “forgotten heroes,” and were eager to offer me their help in the future. Because a great many of the yet “confidential” national documents are accessible only by request by the featured individual, I expect that the contacts I made on this trip will prove highly valuable in the years to come. And, while the public’s desire not to forget the past will hopefully continue to pressure the government to open archives, I know that if progress is made it will likely be a very long and arduous process. As for myself, I will do what I can through my own contacts to make available the documents I manage to recover. One step at a time.

Hello from Cusco, Peru! My name is Liz, I am a second year MA student in CLACS. I am here in Cusco studying intensive Quechua. In addition to studying Quechua during my first year at NYU, I have also been researching constitutional reform and indigenous activism in Ecuador. I am particularly interested in the acknowledgment of cultural and territorial rights of indigenous peoples in Ecuador’s 1998 and 2008 constitutions. My experience learning Quechua has inspired me to further explore the legal and philosophical debates surrounding the inclusion of cultural rights in recent Andean constitutions.

Even though I have been studying Quechua for a year, the first few weeks of class have been extremely challenging. Everyday we have grammar class for four hours and twice a week we have conversation class for two hours. While the intensity of the course has been extremely helpful, I found it slightly overwhelming at first. I´m finally feeling more comfortable with the pace of the class. I am also living with a family here in Cusco. Technically, there is only one Quechua speaker in the household, Maria Adelma, the grandmother. It has been interesting to observe the multiple levels of Quechua ´proficiency´ in Cusco. For example, Eloy, the father in my family, can understand everything in Quechua but has trouble speaking. Eskarleth, Eloy´s wife, is a science teacher in a local high school and often communicates with her students in Quechua but is reluctant to call herself a Quechua speaker. Maria Adelma, however, speaks proudly in Quechua and laments the fact that her children resisted learning the language. I have heard other people here in Cusco describe similar experiences with Quechua. In this sense, it´s been interesting to observe the range of reactions to my clumsy attempts to speak Quechua; everything from uncontrollable laughter, patient understanding, to outright resistance. But, as my favorite saying in Quechua goes ´pisi pisimanta´, with time I´m confident that my Quechua will improve little by little.

Liz Kelley
MA Candidate, CLACS

Photo: Actor Marçal Costa training for a Teatro da Vertigem production.

Hello from São Paulo! During the past two weeks, I have been researching the space of the body in the work of theater and dance companies here. My primary focus is the group Teatro da Vertigem, but I have also been able to meet and familiarize myself with the work of several other performing artists.

Vertigem is currently developing a new piece after The Castle by Franz Kafka. They view this project as an intervention in the city, as well as a theater piece. The company usually stages its performances in site-specific locations; in the past, these have included a church, prison, and hospital (all at least partly abandoned). This time around, The Castle will be performed on the outside of a glass building, about three stories up. The cast of seven will hang from rock-climbing ropes and harnesses, as well as move in three suspended boxes, such as those used by window cleaners. The audience will be inside the building, looking out at the performance through the glass. This staging is a direct response to the particularities of place of São Paulo and their psychophysical effect on its inhabitants. The glass wall separating those that are inside the bureaucratic “castle” from those who cannot gain access is a powerful one in here. Aware of this basic formulation, Vertigem is exploring more deeply the themes of work and control.

I have been able to observe both the rehearsals at the company’s base/studio and the physical training with the ropes and harnesses, which occurs outside a nearby building. They are about halfway into their eight-month rehearsal process, and I am seeing what a struggle it is to try to adapt their bodies to the shifting ground they will be occupying.

Another prevalent element in Vertigem’s work is their collaborative process, which is an intensive exchange between the director, actors, designers and writers. I interviewed the director about the early phases of this exploratory work, and also observed an individual rehearsal with one of the performers. The rehearsal consisted of a vivência, in which the director led the performer to exhaustion through dancing and then through several improvised scenes that combined her personal memories with the character’s biography. The vivência brought about new images and sensory relations as the performer worked within and beyond the narrow window box that her character’s family occupies during the play. I have yet to see how this translates into the group work, but it was a fascinating investigative process.