Memorias disidentes. Revista de estudios críticos del patrimonio, archivos y memorias

Editorial

Carina Jofré, Julieta Magallanes, Mario Rufer — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This third issue of Memorias Disidentes reaffirms the importance of this university-based and transnational publishing project, developed by the hard work and against the current of unstable moods and precarious times we live in, particularly in a context of the advance of the new right in Latin America and the world. In this framework, our editorial office places the editorial project of the magazine, opening questions such as: What meanings does this biannual publication project from the field of Humanities and Social Sciences acquire in this context? What role do academies and, especially, universities have in these transformations? What does it mean to think about heritage narratives from Latin America in contexts of exacerbation of violence and extractive plundering deepened by the new liberal right? What connivances and continuities between governments of a “progressive” or “national and popular” sign and neoliberal governments facilitate, in the end, the very rapid extinction of inclusive and reparative policies in the short term? What new neocolonial projects do these political projects harbor and what are their effects on bodies-territories and on research? What monuments do they erect? What memories do they tear down? What heritages do they conspire with? What work must collective memory do to build new archives sensitive to words, to emotions, to the interweaving of links in times of post-truth? How can we re-establish social coexistence in the face of clear evidence that current Latin American democratic regimes forcefully expose the aporias of great Western values (“freedom,” “equality,” “justice”) exhausted in their traditional senses? What methodologies should we arm ourselves with to expose the strategies of viralization and planned control of the emotions and desires of the public behind a screen? What ephemeral identities shape these times of economic instability, social intolerance, and fulminating racist hatred?

A family photograph, a non-existent archive

Frida Gorbach Rudoy — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 15:05:52 +0000

Starting from a family photograph I reflect on memory. In this case it is not a memory objectified in archives, libraries, museums or monuments but rather one that is embodied since it happens to a living body, which is singular, because it does not completely dissolve into the collective. The reflection arises from a first question: how to build an archive with a single photograph when, supposedly, the idea of uniqueness denies the possibility of historical recording? Then I work from a conceptual plot that links the image with the archive, memory and history: the image that freezes the gaze, the archive that shows the impossibility of recording, the memory that forces the image to give way to time and, finally, the history that deals with the representation of a past that cannot be traced back. In addition to asking a question about identity and its relationship with memory this text is also an exercise that seeks the way to cross the gap that separates individual memory and collective memory in an attempt to imagine other ways of relating to the past and the dead.

“Archive reason” and latin american philosophy

Alejandro De Oto — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:37:59 +0000

The philosopher from Mendoza Arturo Andrés Roig played a crucial role in the development of Latin American philosophy for his work based on the idea of methodological expansion and its opening to semantic dimensions connected to historical processes. Here I explore what was part of his archive, housed today in a special space of the Central Library of the National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina, trying to establish the possible affiliations between his philosophical proposal and the organization of the materials that make up the collection. I privilege, however, a methodological look at the tensions that appear when we consider the layout of this archive, its morphology, and certain marks on what were Roig's working papers.

Forgetting and discarding

Beatriz von Saenger Hernández — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:39:19 +0000

In this article I present some reflections on the conditions that enable mandates of forgetting and estrangement in the processes of safeguarding fragmentary archaeological pieces or tepalcates in Mexico based on the case of the Department of Comparative Archaeological Collections of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Through an ethnography of this department and the narratives of the archaeologists who are members of the team I delve into the condition of impossibility and illegibility of certain pieces as well as the difficulties in the administration of official collections of archaeological projects in Mexico derived from the cumulative method of evidence, as a strategically incomplete “archaeological puzzle”. Thus, I propose some reflections on the forms of constitution of relations of forgetting and discarding on fragmentary archaeological materialities concentrated in this type of collections.

Why Matura?

Jorge Perea, Alejandra Gutiérrez Saracho — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:40:47 +0000

In this work we try to trace the elusive biography of Carlos Alberto “Matura” Nieva. To do so we interweave our experiences with the stories, gossip, rumors and photographic images that have shaped various meanings about his life. “Fat,” “black,” “faggot,” “Peronist.” Matura, an elusive specter for an essentializing classification that reassuringly sets out what he was in Catamarca in the 1980s. Matura, that evocative figure of an era that is missed or despised. Matura, a narrative fold in which other memorial plots emerge, as they can, other abject presences that are excluded from the dominant historiographical order, but that form part of a network of interactions that shaped the daily life of that era.

La Panamericana

Lucía Núñez Lodwick — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:43:19 +0000

This work is part of a postdoctoral research project focused on the memories of dissident sex-activism about the last civil-military dictatorship and the democratic transition in Argentina. It investigates the specific violence perpetrated against this collective that transgressed the moral norms of gender under state terrorism, as well as the possibilities of escape of the agents. Through archival work with journal sources that narrated the horror and testimonies of the protagonists (as a staging of history) it reflects on violence, representations of transvestism, constructions of truth and the affective, political and aesthetic power of the personal archives of the transvestite collective during the dictatorship.

The patrimonialization of the cult image from the mexican state restoration

Eva Astrid Alsmann López — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:57:29 +0000

In Mexico historical cult images are considered monuments and, therefore, national heritage legally protected by the State through the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). In their daily lives they are used in religious rituals for hundreds of years by the communities that have inherited them since colonial times. When the State, embodied in restorers, enters the community to restore a saint, a virgin, a Christ, these become objects of dispute regarding the decision-making about their materiality, the approach to them as representations and the ambiguity about their ownership. With this in mind, I analyze some patrimonialization mechanisms implemented by the INAH, in general, and restoration, specifically, and some of their consequences. I use theoretical and methodological tools from Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Criticism (such as the notion of State tutelage as an exercise of power) to propose that the patrimonialization carried out in the context of our intervention to restore polychrome sculptures/cult images is disruptive and violent for their communities and that part of this violence is crossed, unsuspectedly, by the profanation that we carry out with our patrimonialist discourses and pedagogy. I do not only seek to highlight the discomfort and strangeness that we introduce with our intervention, but also to make my colleagues uncomfortable by inviting them to think about the silencing, that which is hidden from view that is not critically analyzed by the profession.

A roadmap for restoration and conservation of monuments alterated by social protests

Mariacamila Vanegas Dájer — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:00:05 +0000

The professional task of the conservation-restoration discipline is the preservation of works of art or, as the case may be, of cultural assets. To achieve this goal the profession established ten factors of deterioration (the causes that can cause damage to the object) for its prevention. One of these factors is the subject of this article: vandalism, defined as the destruction of objects. However, other academic fields have analyzed this category from a political-social basis that underlies the action itself; it is an approach that restoration has not yet considered either in its theory or in its practice. This article is the result of an investigation that provides elements for the intervention (conservation-restoration) of monuments “vandalized” during protests from the political-social causes. The research is based on the study of the Monument to the Heroes, a highly debated case during and after the Colombian national strike of 2021.

Comechingones and their descendants

Jose María Bompadre — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the reemergence of Indigenous peoples in Córdoba since the 1990s, the Comechingón ethnic category dominated self-descriptive processes over other ethnicities that we can recognize in ethnographic work, such as Sanavirón and Ranquel, or pluriethnic, in the recent modalities of group formation. Knowledge regimes structured over the long duration of history configure Córdoba as a provincial formation of specific alterity which administers the sociocultural diversity within it in different ways and at different times, instituting a total provincial history that extinguishes and preterizes Indigenous people under civilizing devices. To explain its scope in the present, the work aims to identify and restore narratives about the extinction of indigenous people in Córdoba inscribed in the expropriating praxis of provincial governmentality and in a corpus of academic works published in the last century, as central agents of erasure. The discursive effectiveness of narratives is elucidated by the hegemonic or authoritative position that the State and the academy have to make a genealogy of ethnic demarcation through the identification of the mechanisms of disposition of knowledge that they promote, the validation criteria that they seek to impose and their power effects on the population.

Republican crime and citizen restoration in the canudos war

Juan Recchia Páez — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:15:20 +0000

This article reviews the archive of the Canudos war to make visible the textual operations through which subjects erased from history disputed interpretations of the war that took place in the interior of Bahia (Brazil) between 1896 and 1897. In particular, I will address the notion of “crime” developed by two Bahian texts on the war: the Histórico e Relatorio do Comitê Patriótico da Bahia (1901) edited by Lelis Piedade and the Descripção de uma viagem a Canudos (1899) by Alvim Martins Horcades. These texts combine descriptive and argumentative elements that point out the impact of the written word in the restoration of social order after the end of the war in the arraial. In both documents one can see an ambiguous oscillation between the civic claim of the jagunço and the universalist condemnation of the atrocities of the war in the name of Charity and the Fatherland. The texts analyzed are clear examples of how the writing of history becomes a performative work on the event and these dissidences disturb the Manichean logic between victors (republicans) and vanquished (sertanejos) typical of the official textuality of the Canudos war.

HUMUS

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2020, in the province of Córdoba, more than 340 thousand hectares were burned, including native forest. These fires have been happening systematically for more than twenty years and were accepted until they became “normal”. They are intentional fires that correspond to an extractivist policy of plundering our territory and everything that inhabits it. HUMUS is the record of the Borde group's research process on the dance that emerges in relation to the inhabited space in conditions where the destruction of the vital environment is a factor that questions the body as a territory. The interest of the project lies in the relationship with the environment in that particularity: the “moment after” a fire framed in its social and political context. Sustained in an annual cycle, it develops artistic, poetic and political discourses that propose new configurations of meanings that relate bodies to the affected territory. HUMUS provides a decentralized view that allows the expression of the subjects in the situation, based on the subjectivization and awareness of experiencing corporally the destruction of their vital environments. The Borde Danza group spent a year in the same mountain space to record the changes that were taking place in the territory and in their bodies in relation to it. The music in the video that accompanies this work is an original composition by Toni Volpen and Tuto Petruzi, musicians from the same Cordoba town.

How I would like to be a good settler - Just after being born

Viviana Ayilef — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Poetry about colonization and the efforts of Mapuche women to be reborn from memory.

Practical guide to community struggles

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this brief practical guide for community fights we want to test a different approach that goes beyond the reproduction of legal or legal discourse on Prior, Free and Informed Consultation for Indigenous Peoples. This proposal allows us to identify scenarios and concrete practices observed over these years in San Juan and La Rioja (Argentine Republic) in territories threatened by large-scale mining. Our practical guide puts emphasis on the transgressions of the Consultation Previa that we were able to recognize in our visits and conversations during these last three years within the framework of the University Extension Project called Making Community.

Escaping the memory market

Yuri Fraccaroli, Angel Natan — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Acervo Bajubá is a community project to record the memories of Brazilian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, transgender, queer, asexual and pansexual (LGBTQIAP+) communities. Bajubá currently operates in a room at the headquarters of Grupo de Incentivo a la Vida (GIV), a non-governmental organization that defends the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS, located in Vila Mariana, São Paulo. Acervo Bajubá brings together a collection of more than 10,000 items in various materials, in the process of being catalogued, that document sexual diversity and the plurality of gender identities in Brazilian history, especially since the second half of the 20th century. In addition, Bajubá develops cultural actions and projects for the production, mediation and circulation of historical narratives about LGBTQIAP+ people, collectives, organizations and spaces. The artists, educators and researchers involved in the project are responsible for internal research, cleaning, organization and preservation of the items, as well as for providing external services to the public.

Mapuches in Mendoza? Territorial conflicts and denialism in a "Creole province"

Mariela Eva Rodriguez — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This book provides conceptual tools and factual data that allow for a more sophisticated debate that has become public at a national level and, for this reason, is particularly important in the current context, where concerns have been magnified not only about whether there are Mapuches in Mendoza, but also about the legitimacy of indigenous peoples in general. At present, we find ourselves facing a government administration that multiplies disqualifying sentences that flatly deny such a possibility. This attack devastates the rights of indigenous peoples and a history of resistance that involved several generations and, in the same blow, also devastates the scientific system that enabled serious and informed research to challenge prejudices installed by colonial science and local power structures.

Saywas del arenal. Poetic exploration of aridity

José Luis Grosso — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:29:04 +0000

In this book of anthropological poetry, Claudio Amojona his “art-poetics,” which now flows in moving images like an open-air cinema in the middle of the desert on the incandescent screen of day and stars. Claudio Amojona, so extraordinarily and beautifully—or, perhaps, even more so, so sublime, and at the extreme so excessive in its dark immensity—the derivative flow of words.

The return of cultural heritage to Latin America. Nationalism, norms and politics in Colombia, Mexico and Perú

Maai Ortíz — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:30:03 +0000

The Return of Cultural Heritage aims to develop a complex network of actors, institutions, scenarios and discourses on the problem of the return of archaeological heritage objects in the cases of Colombia, Mexico and Peru in recent decades (basically at the end of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century). For his research, Losson chose a corpus that covers six cases in three countries. With regard to Colombia, he analyses the situation of the Quimbaya treasure that has been in the Museum of America in Madrid since the end of the 19th century, as well as the statues of Saint Augustine that have been in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin since the 1920s. In the case of Mexico, he chooses the Teotihuacan frescoes that were returned to that country in the 1980s by the Young Museum in San Francisco (United States); it should be noted that these mural fragments recorded their stay in this place since the 1970s. In the Mexican case, she also decided to work with the Moctezuma headdress, which had been kept in the collections of the Habsburg monarchy since the 16th century and is now in the collection of the Weltmuseum in Vienna. In the Peruvian context, she analyses the Machu Picchu Collection, which had been in the Peabody Museum at Yale University in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the so-called Paracas textiles, kept until 2014 by the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, which had been in this facility since the 1930s.

Wakas and shaking: indigenous terror in the great Andean revolt (1780-1783)

Cristóbal Gnecco — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:31:48 +0000

Another dazzling book by Carlos Páramo. After his work on Lope de Aguirre, published in 2009, comes this one on the Andean revolt led in the Andes of southern Peru by José Gabriel Condorcanqui, better known as Túpac Amaru II, and in the Bolivian highlands by Julián Apaza, better known as Túpac Katari. Fourteen years between one book and another would seem like a world, but that lapse shows that his books are slow-cooked: far from the bureaucratic writing that prevails in academia (the desire to publish more for the points than for the desire for communion) this book is a beautiful example that we academics can also write well, slowly, choosing each word carefully, lovingly —there is something of courtship in that choice, of course, something of seduction, something of dedication and hospitality—, unraveling (and relating) their meanings. Writing, a leisurely act of solitary love (the sublimation of what is loved in the meanders that form on the page), ends in this case in the collective destiny of publication, a destiny for which we, its amazed readers, are grateful.