Gastón Gordillo

Research Interests

I am currently working on two parallel research projects that revolve around the spatiality of politics. At an ethnographic level, and drawing on fieldwork conducted since 2003, I am analyzing several Guaraní land claims in northwest Argentina with the aim of examining the fractured spatial dimensions of a diasporic, urban indigeneity as well as the reterritorializations that the Guaraní political protests are creating in the regional space.

At a theoretical level, I am exploring an approach to the spatiality of politics that aims to rethink Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space along the lines of a bio-political, immanent, affective, and mobile understanding of power and the multitude drawing on authors such as Spinoza, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri. I am using my blog Space and Politics (http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com) as the workshop from which I am gradually building some of these conceptual themes, which in the long run may lead to two different books (tentatively entitled "Resonance and Revolution" and "The Terrain"). The essays posted on the blog examine conceptual questions about space, affect, and violence grounded in contemporary political events, such as Wikileaks, xenophobic violence in Argentina, and the Egyptian Revolution.

I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled "Sediments of History: Ruins and the Destruction of Space" (forthcoming with Duke University Press), which draws on my previous ethnographic research project. I see this book as a conceptual, ethnographic, and historical meditation on the destruction of space, the sedimentation of historical processes of confrontation in the physical texture of landscapes, and the ways in which people evoke the past, and act upon the present, by drawing upon spatial traces from prior eras. Aiming to rethink the concept of “ruins” as a nodal trope of modernity by grounding places in ruins amid wider, living geographies, the narrative examines the palimpsest of vestiges produced by colonial violence, missionization, and capitalist and state expansion at the foot of the Andes in Salta, northern Argentina, where I did fieldwork in 2003-2007. Inspired by seemingly opposed figures such as Adorno and Deleuze, I argue that ruins can be conceptualized as generative spaces: affirmative spatial presences haunted by absent actors and ruptured spaces.

Other topics I have published about are the spatiality of social memory, place-making, hegemony, ethnicity, borders and transnationality, political mobilizations, commodity fetishism, ID-paper fetishism, shamanism, and in general the production of subjectivities through experiences of alienation and capitalist forms of domination. I have analyzed these themes drawing on my ethnographic experience among Toba people of the Gran Chaco in northern Argentina. All of these topics and concepts continue informing my current interests.

 

Prizes

2008. Killam Teaching Award. University of British Columbia.

2005 American Ethnological Society Sharon Stephens Book Award. For the book Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Duke University Press, 2004).

Books

  • n.d. Sediments of History: Ruins and the Destruction of Space. Durham: Duke University Press (forthcoming).
  • 2006 En el Gran Chaco: antropologias e historias (In the Gran Chaco: Anthropologies and Histories). Buenos Aires: Prometeo.
  • 2005 Nosotros vamos a estar aca para siempre: historias tobas.(We're Going to Be Here Forever: Toba Histories).Buenos Aires: Biblos.
  • 2004 Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press. [Spanish version, Lugares de diablos: tensiones del espacio y la memoria. Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2011]
  • (with Juan Martin Leguizamon) 2002 El rio y la frontera: movilizaciones aborigenes, obras publicas y Mercosur en el Pilcomayo (The River and the Border: Indigenous Mobilizations, Public Works, and Mercosur on the Pilcomayo). Buenos Aires: Biblos.

Edited Volumes

  • (with Silvia Hirsch, eds). 2010 Movilizaciones indígenas e identidades en disputa en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: La Crujía-Flacso.
  • (with Silvia Hirsch, eds). 2003 Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina. Special issue of The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(3).

 

Refereed Journal Articles

  • 2011 Longing for Elsewhere: Guaraní Reterritorializations. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(4) (In press).
  • 2011 Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River. Current Anthropology 52(2): 141-167.
  • 2009 Places that Frighten: Residues of Wealth and Violence on the Argentine Chaco Frontier. Anthropologica. 51(2):343-351.
  • 2008 The Clientelization of Ethnicity: Party Hegemony and Indigenous Political Subjectivities. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. 17(3):335-348.
  • [Published in Spanish as: La clientelización de la etnicidad: Hegemonía partidaria y subjetividades políticas indígenas. Revista Española de Antropología Americana. 39(2):247-262, 2009].
  • 2006 The Crucible of Citizenship: ID-Paper Fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco. American Ethnologist 33 (2):162-176.
  • (with Silvia Hirsch) 2003 Introduction: Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence. The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(3):4-30.
  • 2003 Shamanic Forms of Resistance in the Argentinean Chaco: A Political Economy. The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(3): 103-125. 
  • 2002 The Breath of the Devils: Memories and Places of an Experience of Terror. American Ethnologist 29(1):33-57.
  • 2002 The Dialectic of Estrangement: Memory and the Production of Places of Wealth and Poverty in the Argentinean Chaco. Cultural Anthropology 17(1):3-31.
  • 2002 Locations of Hegemony: The Making of Places in the Toba's Struggle for La Comuna, 1989-1999. American Anthropologist 104(1): 262-277.
  • 2001 "Un rio tan salvaje e indomito como el indio toba": una historia antropologica de la frontera del Pilcomayo. ("A River as Wild and Indomitable as the Toba Indian": An Anthropological History of the Pilcomayo Border). Desarrollo Economico Vol. 41 No. 162: 261-280.
  • 1996 Hermeneutica de la ilusion: la etnologia fenomenologica de Marcelo Bormida y su construccion de los indigenas del Gran Chaco. (Hermeneutics of Illusion: The Phenomenological Ethnology of Marcelo Bormida and its Construction of the Gran Chaco Indigenous Groups). Cuadernos de Antropologia Social 9: 135-171.
  • 1996 Entre el monte y las cosechas: migraciones estacionales y retencion de fuerza de trabajo entre los tobas del oeste de Formosa (Argentina). (Between the Bush and the Harvests: Labor Migrations and Retention of Labor Power Among the Toba of Western Formosa). Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos Ano 1, No. 32: 135-167.
  • 1995 Despues de los ingenios: la mecanizacion de la zafra salto-jujena y sus efectos sobre los indigenas del Chaco centro-occidental (After the Plantations: The Mechanization of the Sugarcane Harvest in Salta and Jujuy and its Effects on the Western Chaco Indigenous Groups). Desarrollo Economico. 35 (137):105-126.
  • 1994 La presion de los mas pobres: reciprocidad, diferenciacion social y conflicto entre los tobas del oeste de Formosa. (The Demand of the Poor: Reciprocity, Social Differentiation, and Conflict Among the Toba of Western Formosa). Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Pensamiento Latinoamericano 15: 53-82.
  • 1993 La actual dinamica economica de los cazadores-recolectores del Gran Chaco y los deseos imaginarios del esencialismo. (The Current Economic Dynamic of the Gran Chaco Hunters and Gatherers and the Imaginaries of Essentialism). Publicar en Antropologia y Ciencias Sociales 3: 73-96.

Book Chapters

  • n.d. Traces of Empire in Savage Geographies. In Ann Stoler, ed. Imperial Debris. Durham: Duke University Press (under review).
  • 2009 The Ruins of Ruins: On the Preservation and Destruction of Historical Sites in Northern Argentina. In Lena Mortensen and Julie Hollowell, eds. Archaeologies and Ethnographies: Iterations of the Past. Pp. 30-54. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
  • 2008 Places and Academic Disputes: The Argentinean Gran Chaco. In Deborah Poole, ed. Companion to Latin American Anthropology. Pp. 447-465. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • 2002 Remembering the Ancient Ones: Memory, Hegemony, and the Shadows of State Terror in the Argentinean Chaco. In Belinda Leach and Winnie Lem, eds. Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis. Pp. 177-190. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  • 2000 Canales para un rio indomito: frontera, estado y utopias aborigenes en el noroeste de Formosa. (Canals for a Wild River: Borders, States, and Aboriginal Utopias in Northwest Formosa). In Alejandro Grimson, ed. Fronteras, naciones e identidades: la periferia en el centro. Pp. 232-255. Buenos Aires: Ed. Ciccus-La Crujia. 
  • 1999 The Toba of the Argentine Chaco. In Richard Lee and Richard Daly, eds. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Pp. 110-113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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