And the winner of the Short Story Contest is....
We are glad to announce the winner of our 2023 edition Short Story Contest, in the frame of the LatAm Conference 2023!!! The 2023 edition of the short story competition was open to all MCAA members residing in Iberoamerica who wished to express their personal vision of science through literature!!
Congratulations Juan Rivera for his masterpiece "CATTLE, COWBOYS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS"!!!!
CATTLE, COWBOYS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS
A creative writing essay on interspecies relations in the Andes This creative writing essay intends to deal with the genealogy of a personal quarter-century reflection on Andean human-animal relations. Why did I ended up obsessively thinking on Andean cattle branding rituals all along the first quarter of the twenty-first century? What was so elusive to the sight of the skinny cholo university student in that rodeo celebrated at San Juan de Viscas on May 1999?
Trying to answer these questions, I would like to provide a Latin American perspective on the intersection between, on the one hand, animal studies and Anthropocene problems, and on the other hand, ethnography and literature. This intersection foster us to reflect on the way a Global South or subaltern condition informed or de-formed specific aspirations and avoidances expressed in the ethnography of human-animal relations, as José María Arguedas letally intended in The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below (Arguedas 2000, Arguedas 1990 [1971]). His efforts to face the end of "his" world and its saturation by inequality, extractivism, ruins and other features of what is called today the Anthropocene are patent in those of his poems, narratives, letters and ethnographies peopled by foxes, dogs, bulls and cats.
This text intends taking fiction and biographical narrative as a self-reflective ethnographic method. At the same time, this attention to art intends to reflect not only on the evident aesthetic dimension of the rites I focused in over the past decades (known as “herranza” or “rodeo”) but also on a possible solution to the dilemmas of seeing ethology as a lesson for anthropology. The latter is the focus of the last section of this text fostered by some early concerns drawn by the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret. But before that, I will begin to draw a line between my own experience of growing up in one of the poorest Latin American capitals’ slums and my involvement in the scientific community in the Global North. San Juan de Viscas on May 1999 was the place where that line made a key point of inflection. But I will go a bit further: what interests me to explore here is not so much that place where I observed the rodeo for the first time —which my ethnographies have intended already to describe (Rivera 1999)—, but a previous place: that one where the sight of the skinny cholo university student was configured: Carabayllo. There are two reasons behind this decision.
One is the prominence of both crisis and ruins in those Latin American slums that, as Carabayllo, were fed by decades long war killing indigenous peasants in the countryside. A second reason is the intimate connection between those rituals on cattle I observed during my fieldwork and the socio-natural damages derived from the proximity of the megalopolis of Lima affecting both Andean peasants’ farming and therefore way of life. Devastation and slow violence were intrinsic both to the conditions in which I myself became a scholar in Lima and the dilemmas being expressed by those human-animal relations that called my attention in the Andes as a young anthropologist. This is at the core of the next section.
Leaving a suit murky of injustice in Peru
I take here as a random point of departure a poem from Trilce, the most experimental work of another cholo of modest origins and descendant of highlanders, César Vallejo. The reflection was motivated by a request made by the Peruvian poet Pedro Granados —himself growing up in a proletarian neighbourhood in Lima where later he became my teacher at the university before moving to the deserts of Northern Peru—.
"Trilce VI". Almost twenty years now out of Peru; that is, from Carabayllo or from Lima, it doesn't matter. And I'm still not back. Since I might probably not return; I will try to outline here what becomes rather incommunicable every time one leaves like this, as if escaping: the awareness of a particular violence for those who continue under its paradoxical aegis (that is, who are born and die from and with violence). It should be noted, from the beginning, that the problem of the communicability of this consciousness seems, in reality, not so different from the one that affects the everlasting anthropological desire: the translation of beauty, of the formidable, of the mystery —of that which the ethnographer (once rescued from his fieldwork) manages to remember.
Do the people ask for true justice? Well, we make them settle for one that's a little less unfair. Are the workers screaming enough of exploitation? Well, let's try to make them a little less exploited, but above all, don't be ashamed of being so... Do you want classes to disappear? Well, we will make that there is not so much difference, or better, that it is not so noticeable. Do you want revolution? Well, we will give them reforms, we will drown them in reforms... better yet, in promises of reforms that we will never give them (Darío Fo. Accidental death of an anarchist, 1970).
El traje que vestí mañana / no lo ha lavado mi lavandera: / lo lavaba en sus venas otilinas, / en el chorro de su corazón, y hoy no he / de preguntarme si yo dejaba / el traje turbio de injusticia”. Indeed, to flee from the brutalized lunatics covered in filth, those who daily search through the garbage that boils under the sun at one end of Avenida Universitaria; I took – with almost no money or friends – a plane that would land in the opposite hemisphere; that is, the skyscrapers of Boston, or the parks of Madrid, it doesn't matter.
It is still a mystery to me how that boy dared to take advantage of his solitude like that. But let it be clear that he was not accomplishing his destiny! Rather, he modified it. Should a child without a father, torn from his mother's arms, grown up in a borrowed house, in a neighbourhood (a country, a subcontinent; it doesn't matter) ravaged by violence ―that of alcohol, that of gangs, that of the massacres, that of the civil war―; should that young man pretend, not only to dedicate his life to the scarce sciences of man, but also to do so in the (almost always, imperial) capitals of the North?
No, his destiny was not to leave his mother in a refinery camp that was long ago denounced as one of the most unbreathable cities in the world; nor leave his other mother in the brutal and soft Lima, that almost illiterate old woman who would raise him with all the strength she had left after so much labour and pain. It was certainly not his. Nevertheless, it was precisely these two women who taught him to overcome the perennial inequality of Peru, to evade ―this is crucial― the sharp degradations of it ―be it pure hatred, industrial alcohol, car bombs or moral corruption―.
No, that was definitely not the path that would have been assigned to him by the socioeconomic data that someone (supposedly interested in Christian charity or political developmentalism) could well have gathered; but if he had stayed, it would have been above all to suffer at their side; or so he feared, rather. Even clearer: leaving Peru, one cannot but leave behind el turbio traje in Trilce ―the one that floods everything (both Yauricocha and Santiago de Chuco as well as Uccle or Montparnasse); but that, in certain regions (in both hemispheres, let's be clear), it suffocates you more (a little more) than in others...
On humiliation and tenderness
Focusing my gaze on livestock rituals in the central Andes of South America marked, for me, a kind of ontological juxtaposition. The metaphor of a non-human entity being both, or intermittently, object and subject. The liminality of a species involved in human and non-human rituals that were marked by a necessary violence (to maintain a certain order of things), and a lacerating tenderness (produced by the contradiction between a tacit love in the development of the rite and its implicit betrayal in the final objective of the rite) (Rivera 2003).
Years after my scrutiny of this juxtaposition, I learned of the encounter between some desert birds and an ethologist who, after observing them for a long time, believed he had found a key principle of animal life (or social life, according to a philosopher who spied on him with his consent).
Vinciane Despret's reflections (2021) on the relationship between an ethologist and some birds could serve as an example of how obsession on an animal can be linked to a reflection that goes beyond any human-nonhuman divide. Trying to "unweave" (detisser) the construction of the representations on the Arabian babbler, Despret suggests that the expectations of the observer (in this case, the renowned ethologist Amotz Zahavi) may well produce the existence of extraordinary animals. She also confesses it is unsure if the action of an animal is the one that produces its interpretation; or if it is rather this interpretation that would produce the existence of the action itself.
Such are the intuitions and doubts that assail the Belgian philosopher when she travels to the Negev desert (Israel) to join Zahavi who, after years studying the "collective dance", "altruistic behaviors" and "reciprocity" among the Arabian babbler, formulates a mechanism ampler than that of sexual selection: the handicap principle (or principle of the selection of reliable signals). As is known, this theory proposes that those morphological traits that might seem like a weakness (because they would make them more detectable by their predators), would end up becoming an advantage. That is, the animal would display its weaknesses in order to show its ability to overcome them and thus demonstrate its strength.
In her analysis of Zahavi's elaborations—in which she uses words like catachresis or sophism—Despret considers the transformation of the history of ethology into a panopticon about our beliefs, our utopias, and the definition and constitution of humans in relation to animals. However, the possibility of drawing lessons for anthropology from ethology ends up crashing into a sort of unbreakable wall: What were animals like before I started looking at them? How could the nature of the Arabian babbler be known before (or without) the gaze of the ethologist, if le monde barré par notre Umwelt ne nous donne comme signal que ce qui nous signale avant tout à nous (Despret 2021: 157)?
The possibility of an answer that avoids both the traps of a sterile constructivism and those of a dogmatic realism could only be found, according to Despret, in a simultaneously ethical and aesthetic investigation: Who am I, how is my gaze so that you appear to me as you are?
So: Who is this anthropologist descendant of a devastated and surviving people, how is or can his gaze be so that the cattle of the rodeo appeared to him as he described them in terms of tenderness and humiliation? Despret’s question goes beyond the deconstruction of any particular ethology, and tries to erase the great modern divide between nature and culture. One could think of approaches as that of Anna Tsing (2018) and many others, but actually almost every anthropological study of folklore or mythology is replete with human perspectives on non-human behaviour. An example of the antiquity of this interest is the magnificent Zuñi account of the dance of the owls, compiled by the first field anthropologist, Frank Hamilton Cushing:
One day, the sand owls organized a great dance among themselves, quite early in the morning. Their dance was especially important to them, its execution required great dexterity... they danced to the rhythm of the whistles of some and the clicking of the beaks of others, perfectly synchronized... "We danced", said the owl, "both for our pleasure and for the good of the city" (2022: 210-211).
As ethology uses myth, we can see above that mythology (like many other depths of the spirit addressed by anthropology) is constantly reconnected with science. And the personal biography of the ethnographer, with his/her gaze on animals. Emerging from ruins, a Latin American sight gets in tune with the suffering of indigenous ways of life, animals involved in farming and many other nonhumans actively participating in a ritual. The cows and bull of the rodeo are thus the venas abiertas of Indoamérica, and the young Peruvian anthropologist-poet found the banal poem of it.