Monthly Archives: June 2009

Zeichner_Brazil_062409, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

I arrived in Brazil on June 2, 2009. And, even though this would not be my first in the country, I have a clear recollection of feeling a strong sense of anxiety upon arrival, likely caused by my awareness of the difficulty one experiences in Brazil when trying to plan a research routine in advance. Remembering my previous experiences, I already knew that life in Brazil tends to be full of unforeseen contingencies that are often the result of unpredictable happenings.

My project in Brazil aims to explore the formation of alternative gender constructions in the industrial suburbs surrounding Sao Paulo during Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). During the military regime, many left-wing political organizations, among which university student activists were the dominant participants, embraced the belief that the true revolutionary “vanguard” could only be found among popular sectors. This ideological approach motivated several leftist groups to send members into factories in the Greater Sao Paulo Area to effectively become factory workers. For those that went into factories, this meant not only a rethinking of class identities, but also of appropriate ways to perform masculinity and femininity. While their inspiration to engage in this type of political and social organizing was, ultimately, based on a romanticized and essentialized understanding of what they considered to be the “working class,” these individuals toiled and marched side-by-side with rank-and-file workers and union leaders, and ultimately contributed to shaping the identity of a new age in labor-oriented activism.

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Weible_Christine_Argentina_061309, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

My time spent in Cordoba Capital last weekend provided me with an interesting pair of memory sites to contrast with those that I’ve been learning about here in Buenos Aires. I toured both Paseo Buen Pastor, and the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria de Cordoba.

Paseo Buen Pastor is an ex-CCD/ women’s prison. (Paseo Buen Pastor). It was inaugurated as a cultural space in 2007. Situated in the middle of the busy zone of Nueva Cordoba, one really would not guess that it was the site of an ex-CCD. Some of the original architecture remains, but it has been renovated and added to in a very modern style. The paseo contains upscale shops, expensive restaurants, art galleries, and venues for music and theater. There is also green space where people congregate to drink mate and watch the aguas danzantes, a fountain that is programmed to perform a nightly show with music and lights.

There is very little indication of Paseo Buen Pastor’s prior use as an ex-CCD. There is an information desk that provides information about the history of the site as well as about other cultural and touristic excursions in the city and in the surrounding province. The emphasis is on creating a gathering space for people, however, not exploring the recent violent past.

At Plaza San Martin there is a former clandestine detention center that functioned in the Cabildo, the center of municipal affairs in the city. It was fairly typical in its usage as a secret place for interrogation and torture during the dictatorship. The interesting part of its recent inauguration as a memory site is the emphasis on the personalities, histories, and families of the victims. The organization in charge of the site is the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria.

Various family members have put together albums dedicated to their missing children to put on display in one of the rooms of the site. These albums look like scrapbooks that any family might have, and include things such as newspaper clippings, baby photos, report cards and drawings. I met Americo Losada, the father of one of the desaparecidos held at the Cabildo, while checking out the site. He showed me his son’s album, proudly pointing out that his son had been very tall, had never failed a class, and had been a dedicated activist in various social causes. The conversation that we had about his son was very similar to any conversation that one might have with a proud father. He didn’t really speak about his son’s disappearance or its effect on his family. The emphasis was on his life. The photo posted above is of Americo displaying the album.

Christine Weible
MA Candidate, CLACS and Museum Studies

Lasater_Amy_Peru_June23, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Hello again from Peru! I’ve now been here for about a month and have just finished my work in Lima. (I’m changing locations for the last two weeks of research.)

One of the most interesting and intellectually productive events that I attended in Lima since I last wrote was a series of lectures at the Catholic university (PUCP), which dealt with the phenomenon of “lovemarks,” commercial brands that inspire a high degree of consumer loyalty and affection. PUCP had identified several Peruvian brands that they considered lovemarks, including Gloria (a dairy brand), Inca Kola (a ubiquitous and frequently maligned yellow cola), Sublime (chocolate bars with peanuts), and Crystal (beer); representatives from each of the brands spoke about the ways that the companies have worked to strengthen consumer “love” for their products. Each of the brands emphasized that they were capitalizing on the consumer’s sense of being Peruvian and on the sense that consuming these products was a way of expressing that Peruvianness. The woman from Crystal spoke particularly passionately about the ways that certain brands can unite a country; she felt that Peruvians were always told that they were a nation too diverse to unite under any common cause or way of thinking, but she thought that particular brands had the potential to bridge those divides. All of the speakers agreed that this moment in Peru’s history is a particularly fruitful one for “lovemarks” because it is a time of optimism; the years of terrorism have ended, and Peruvians are succeeding economically.

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Hayman_Uruguay_06.09-1, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Greetings from Uruguay! I have now been in Montevideo for over a month and am attempting to take stock of what is and is not working well as I reach the halfway point of my research in the field. In the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to carry out more in-depth interviews with important political and social actors in the campaign to annul the Expiry Law (mentioned in my previous blog post, below), including Marisa Ruiz, the former president of Amnesty International Uruguay, Oscar Urtazún from Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, several members of the national labor union PIT-CNT, a member of the Partido Comunista Uruguay active in the campaign, and academic experts Marcelo Viñar and Maren Ulriksen, all of whom were incredibly generous with their time and resources.
Perhaps my most fruitful conversation in the last two weeks was with Elbio Ferrario, the current director of MUME (Central Cultural Museo de la Memoria), which opened in 2007 and receives funding through the Intendencia Municipal de Montevideo. Unlike ESMA in Buenos Aires, MUME does not occupy a former detention and torture site. Also unlike ESMA, it is open to organized school groups of children younger than 16, so there are lots of very young children from the neighborhood at the site, engaged in art classes and workshops or playing on the extensive museum grounds. The neighborhood where MUME is located is extremely distant from downtown Montevideo and is both socially and economically marginalized – in fact, the museum has implemented a breakfast program for the local children who visit because they haven’t eaten at home. Ferrario told me, memorably, that the children with whom he discusses human rights often ask him why their human rights are being violated.
I will discuss my visit to the museum more on my blog, but Ferrario has motivated me to think about how memory and human rights discourses intersect with contemporary social problems like violence, insecurity, and economic marginalization on the periphery of Montevideo.

Some of the major challenges of my research include:

1) Focusing my project. I attribute part of this challenge to the fact that I’m simultaneously conducting a reporting assignment for the Journalism Department while I’m researching for CLACS – I am more comfortable using reporting techniques to approach my subjects because I’m not trained as an anthropologist/sociologist, but I’m not sure if this will yield the results I need for both projects.

2) Conducting better-targeted interviews. To optimize the time I have, I tend to ask people two sets of questions – one for the reporting assignment, one for CLACS, but this makes everything feel very diffuse. I now explain both projects to my subjects, but I think I need to start separating the people I want to talk to for one project from the other, and to narrow down the information I specifically need from each person.

3) Getting a broad sense of the variety of opinions on the Expiry Law. Professional survey results are published periodically online, but I need to conduct my own surveys, and still haven’t put together a set of questions that will be useful for BOTH of my projects. I still need to talk to the Ministry of Defense and members of the armed forces – I’m planning to do this at an event on Friday.

4) Balancing interview time and independent archival research. I still haven’t determined how critical archival research will ultimately be in this project – thus far, I’ve left it on the back burner, which may come back to haunt me.

Any feedback or advice would me much appreciated!

Mari Hayman
MA Candidate, CLACS

Vazquez-Rojas_Mexico061609, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Today it has been exactly two weeks since I arrived in Pátzcuaro to start my field research about the interpretation of plurals in P’urhépecha, also known as Tarascan. P’urhépecha is a language isolate -it has no known linguistic relatives, and it is spoken in the state of Michoacán, in Western Mexico, by approximately 100.000 speakers.

The first days of my stay here were devoted to find speakers of the language that would have the patience and time to help me out with my research. Some people kindly agreed to work with me. Two of them are from the village of Ihuatzio, and three others from the small town of Puácuaro. The two locations are approximately 50km (31 miles) from each other, but the variants of P’urhépecha spoken in each of them vary, sometimes in aspects that turn out to be of comparative importance to my research.

My research is about how Tarascan plural nouns are interpreted, in comparison to Spanish plural nouns, and this involves a survey of the contexts in which plural morphemes can and cannot occur in this language. The hypothesis that I am trying to test is that plural nouns in P’urhépecha have a different interpretation and syntactic behaviour from their Spanish and English counterparts. Tarascan plurals have a more limited occurrence than Spanish plurals. Many of the nouns that in Spanish could bear a plural morpheme –s without a problem, (say calabazas, ‘pumpkins’) in Tarascan can only bear the plural affix –icha under very particular conditions. One of those conditions is that the noun (without the plural) refers to a collection of countable things. And many of the things that in Spanish (or English) are considered countable, in P’urhépecha are not seen as such. For instance, the nouns for pumpkins, beans, avocados, flowers, tortillas, onions, and fruits and vegetables in general are not necessarily considered countable in P’urhépecha, and they are seen as a non-delimited collection of things: a mass, so to speak. These nouns can be used in their non-plural form and refer to a non-delimited collection of things that can contain one or more than one element, more or less in the same way in which English treats nouns like sand, or rice.

However, in some contexts the plural morpheme –icha can occur with one of these nouns, but then necessarily the resulting noun refers to a collection of more than one element: a strictly plural entity. For instance, we can say that John harvests avocadoes for a living using any of the sentences in (1) or in (2):

(1) Jwanu pikwá-sïn-ti kupánda
Juan harvest-HAB-3IND avocado
‘Juan harvests avocadoes’ (lit: Juan harvests avocado)

(2) Jwanu pikwá-sïn-ti kupánda-icha-ni
Juan harvest-HAB-3IND avocado-PL-ACC
‘Juan harvests avocadoes’

This use of the plural stands in contrast to languages like English, where one can say “dogs have tails” without entailing that each dog has more than one tail. In Tarascan it is infelicitous to utter (3), since it entails that each dog has a plurality of tails. The only right way to convey that general statement is by means of (4), where the noun ‘tail’ is in its non-plural form:

(3) # wíchu-icha chéeti-icha juká-s-ti
dog-PL tail-PL have-ASP-3IND
‘Dogs have tails’

(4) wíchu-icha chéeti juká-s-ti
dog-PL tail have-ASP-3IND
‘Dogs have tails’ (lit: dogs have tail)

So far, I have been able to test that in Tarascan some nouns that are considered non- countable can only take plural forms when they really involve more than one individualized element. The non-plural marked forms, however, are not necessarily interpreted as ‘singular’, since they can make reference to sets of one or more element (like in sentence1). The plural marker in Tarascan is thus not the exact correspondent of Spanish –s or English –z.

In order to make this inquiry, I have designed questionnaires and asked the speakers to translate some sentences from Spanish to Tarascan and vice-versa. But translations are not enough as semantic data. Hence, I have also designed some interviews where I show pictures and ask the informants to describe what they see. In order to collect negative evidence as well (that is, not only what can be said in a context in P’urhépecha, but also judgments about what cannot be said), I make some minor modifications on the sentences they provide me, adding or deleting plural morphemes in the scenarios at hand.

So far, my stay in the P’urhépecha area has let me attest directly that common place that says that different languages partition the surrounding world in different ways. The most interesting part of this statement is of course, to find out how that different semantic partitioning helps us understand how language in general is structured, which universal principles are observed cross-linguistically, and in which aspects languages like Spanish and Tarascan vary. Needless to say, this field trip has been an extremely enriching experience, not only in my academic formation, but also in my understanding of a different culture through the language they use.

Abbreviations used:
PL- plural
ASP – aspect
HAB – habitual
IND – indicative
3- third person
ACC- accusative case

Violeta Vázquez-Rojas
PhD Candidate, NYU Department of Linguistics

Armillas-Tiseyra_Argentina_06.15.09, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Hello all,

After spending almost a month in Buenos Aires, researching in the archive, I am back in New York, and beginning to pull together the information and material I gathered in my time away.
Reflecting on my work, I am surprised by how different my experience was from what I had expected. In preparing for my departure—pulling together bibliographies, beginning to identify documents I wanted to look at in the archive, etc.—I had thought I would get as much writing as investigation done while I was away. However, once in Buenos Aires, I found that my focus quickly shifted to gathering as much material as possible and to taking advantage of my time in there by meeting with professors, exploring bookstores, etc. Over the course of my time there, I increasingly made an effort to allow my research and my thinking to “wander,” so to speak. I found that I had vastly underestimated the importance of this intellectual “wandering” that time in the archive (or the field) researching allows. I found quite a bit of material pertaining to my initial questions, but I also encountered unexpected details that, while perhaps not immediately useful to the topic(s) on which I am working, gave me a more textured understanding of Sarmiento in general.
When I initially formulated my project, I wanted to find and analyze Sarmiento’s discussion of the Facundo in his correspondence, as a means for beginning to think about the particular tension between the various “protagonists” (Facundo Quiroga, the biographical subject, but also Juan Manuel de Rosas and Sarmiento himself, both of whom lurk in the background) of the text. This had roughly two components: (1) the discussion of the Facundo as an important social/political “tool”—i.e. as an integral part of Sarmiento’s broader political and cultural program, for which, for example, the translations of the Facundo in Sarmiento’s lifetime were important starting points, and (2) the discussion of the internal dynamics of the text itself, particularly in terms of Sarmiento’s aggressive focus on Quiroga versus Rosas. I, perhaps predictably, found much more of the former than the latter. What became increasingly clear to me as I was working, however, was that the Facundo (the text) is itself the most valuable resource for exploring my questions—close and critical reading being central to my work as a literary scholar. In the coming weeks, I look forward to developing my close reading of the tension between the various “protagonists” of the Facundo in conjunction with the material I gathered on the trip, and to presenting this research in October.

Attached to this post is a photograph of the first publication of the Facundo—it was originally serialized in the Chilean newspaper El Progreso; it appears in the bottom third of the page—one of the many documents I was able to look at in archives and library of the Museo Histórico Sarmiento.

Magali Armillas-Tiseyra
PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature

VanderJact_CostaRica_06_09, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Nearing the end of my time in Quepos, Costa Rica I reflect on the changes in my thought processes, obstacles encountered and adaptations made throughout my research here. An initial obstacle coming into the experience was my language level. I hoped, rather fool-heartedly, to remedy this problem to a sufficient extent during my first two weeks in a language immersion and home stay program. However, as all who have undergone the process of learning a second language know, two weeks is far from enough! While my knowledge of the language has improved by leaps and bounds, the process of face to face interviewing has been a continual struggle throughout my time in the field. During my interview with the Mayor of Quepos, Oscar Monge, I realized that I needed to make a change in my approach. Originally, I had planned to base the majority of my field research on formal interviews and participant observation with a modest number of supplementary surveys. However, realizing the language barrier’s effect on my investigation, I shifted toward privileging the collection of surveys over my original intention to gather the majority of my information through formal interviews. I was at first hesitant to make this switch, realizing the complications that accompany the use of surveys, including loaded questions, leading answers, and the contrast between qualitative and quantitative data that results from this research method. But, what other way to determine its usefulness, than to try?
With renewed inspiration I hit the streets of Quepos and Manuel Antonio daily, walking from shop to shop, street to street, introducing myself and my research to anyone who would listen. With all of my initial hesitations at the forefront of my mind, I was met with a completely unexpected enthusiasm and support from local residents. After spending 3 weeks gathering surveys, I am still amazed at the level of acceptance and cooperation that I encountered; of approximately 230 potential participants, a total of 200 surveys were collected. Throughout the surveying process I was able to meet an enormous subsection of people who, if I had proceeded with my original strategy, would have been unfortunately absent from my work. In addition to collecting a huge amount of data from local residents, the survey acted as an entry point to further conversation about environmental consciousness in the area, as well as resident’s perceptions of tourism’s role in their daily lives. In hindsight, I realize that every cloud does have a silver lining: the obstacles that I encountered led to a more fruitful method of immersing myself in the local community, an absolutely essential element for my particular line of questioning.
In addition to my survey collection, I altered my in-depth interview method as well. The majority of interviews I conducted after the first two weeks have been via e-mail, a process which each participant has kindly agreed to. Finally, as pictured above, the Director of the Environmental Education Program at Manuel Antonio National Park, Javier Herrera, allowed me to attend his presentations on the importance of environmental preservation and protection at two local schools. The presentation pictured above was targeted at primary school children in Quepos, complete with interactive question and answering as well as a natural habitat activity shown in the above photo. I look forward to my time back in the states to compile my survey data, connect already visible and interesting patterns in responses, and solidify connections between conversation and observation. Pura Vida!

Diana Van der Jagt
MA Candidate, CLACS

Armillas-Tiseyra_Magali_Argentina_06-07-2009, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Hello all,

As I near the end of my time in Buenos Aires, I am both a little overwhelmed and overwhelming pleased with the amount of material and information I have been able to gather in the last few weeks. It has been a productive trip, and I am looking forward to returning to New York to begin carefully analyzing and writing about this material.
I have focused my research in the Archive and the library of the Museo Histórico Sarmiento, where I have been fortunate to find a lot of the what I was looking for in edited—as opposed to the original document or on microfilm—form, although in vary rare editions I would have been unlikely to have access to elsewhere. This means I have also been able to photocopy some of the material, which will be of much help when I begin writing. In addition, the staff at the Museo has been immensely helpful and welcoming, which has made my work easy. I had expected to spend much more time running around Buenos Aires, but have instead found that the Museo could provide me with most of the material I was seeking.
In my time here, one of the most useful pieces of material I have looked at has been the physical (paper) catalogue of the Archive. When I arrived, the electronic database, which is keyword-searchable, was down and I was initially disappointed by the technical challenge. However, combing through the entire catalogue—which includes keywords and summaries for each of the pieces in the Archive’s collective—proved to be immensely productive, as it drew my attention to documents and keywords I would not otherwise have thought to look at or for. Challenges this such as this have helped me broaden my search and open my thinking to more innovative angles and approaches.
The greatest pleasure of my time in Buenos Aires has been meeting with local scholars, which I mentioned in my last post, to discuss my research. Conversation with experts in the field and the difference of perspective has been immensely refreshing. For example, Adriana Amante, a Sarmiento scholar who teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires as well as NYU Buenos Aires, was particularly helpful in (re)opening my thinking and my search toward Sarmiento’s other published texts as potential resources for my research project.
In the remaining week I will be looking at a final selection of letters I’ve made from my reading of the catalogue and also hope to take a look at the original edition(s) of the Facundo, which are held in the library of the Museo. Finally, I will be spending some time in several of Buenos Aires’s many bookstores, browsing for hard-to-get and unexpected finds.

Attached to this post is a photograph of the main room of the Archive at the Museo, where I have done most of my work. Over the desk hangs a late portrait of Sarmiento in military uniform, one of many that are scattered around the offices of the Museo.

Magali Armillas-Tiseyra
PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature

Lasater_Amy_Peru_0604, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Hello from Lima, Peru! I’ve been here for two weeks now, and I’m pleased to report that I’m finally starting to get a sense of the city and the people who live here. I should begin by saying that one of my goals for the summer was to sort out my initial thoughts about my dissertation research (which is still a couple of years in the future), and one of the ideas I’ve been interested in exploring is how perceptions of national and regional identity are reflected in Peruvian food corporations’ advertising practices and research and development plans. Accordingly, I’ve been trying not only to familiarize myself with food and ads here but also to get a sense of what, exactly, Lima’s identity might be and how that fits into consumption practices.

To that end, last Saturday (May 30) I found myself in Lima’s Plaza de Armas to celebrate one of Peru’s newest holidays, National Potato Day. The program included a parade, a speech from the Minister of Culture, a play about the benefits of potatoes for Peru’s economy, statements from representatives from private corporations, and a surprise visit from an actress from Ayacucho. (The picture I’ve included is from the parade; the potato-shaped vendors carts are actually used in Lima’s downtown.)

In large part, the speakers discussed the need to reinvigorate a sense of national pride in the potato. Although the potato originated in Peru, its consumption in many parts of the country (including Lima) has been decreasing in favor of imported rice and noodles. This decrease in consumption is in turn catastrophic for the mountain communities who rely on potato farming for their survival. Accordingly, National Potato Day exists as a means of trying to promote potato consumption throughout the country – largely (as far as I can tell) through the device of marketing to the rich rather than reaching out specifically to the poor. Speakers throughout the day emphasized the fact that Andean potatoes’ exotic qualities could attract tourists and provoke new gastronomic delights. Furthermore, they suggested that farmers would be able to earn more money for their crops if their potatoes were packaged in plastic and sold in value-added forms like potato chips. The overall effect was to cast the consumption of potatoes as something that was not only patriotic but also clever; the speakers encouraged the audience not only to eat Peruvian potatoes but also to do new, creative things with them.

Overall, the ceremony articulated Peruvian identity as an amalgamation of unique historical and natural resources and modern ingenuity. But I was intrigued by the way that it also hinted at a tension between the ways that Peruvian identity is often articulated (through the evocation of Andean indigeneity) and the relative lack of indigenous cultural displays in Lima itself. For instance, the play included an unflattering and stereotyped pair of bumbling altiplano characters, and the actress chided the audience for not speaking Quechua, Peru’s indigenous language. These are the sorts of things that I’m hoping to look at further during the rest of my stay in Lima; with luck, maybe I’ll have material with which to address them in my next post!

Amy Lasater
PhD Candidate, Anthropology

Hayman_Uruguay_06.09, originally uploaded by CLACS – NYU.

Hello all! I’ve been in Montevideo, Uruguay since May 9th, not including a week in Argentina attending activities with local scholars and fellow grad students at NYU’s Buenos Aires campus. My first week in Montevideo was spent conducting preliminary fieldwork and setting up interviews with members of a long list of organizations to discuss the political and social dimensions of the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law), a controversial 1986 law that extends legal immunity to the Uruguayan armed forces for crimes committed during the country’s 1973-85 civic-military dictatorship. Thanks to wonderful help from activist Andrea Caraballo and journalist/professor Lawrence Weschler in New York, I have been able to contact members of a number of groups that form the Coordinadora Nacional por la Anulación de la Ley de Caducidad, the umbrella coalition that is campaigning to annul the law via national referendum on October 25th.
So far, I have interviewed the secretary of Amnesty International Uruguay and will speak to the last AI president about the organization’s role in the political mobilization to collect signatures. I also plan to speak to the PIT-CNT, the national labor union that helped initiate the campaign for signatures, the Latin America Coordinator at SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia Uruguay), active in a prior unsuccessful 1989 campaign to repeal the Ley de Caducidad, academic experts like Marcelo Viñar, Alvaro Rico, Hugo Achugar, and journalists Natalia Castelgrande, Alberto Silva, Roger Rodriguez, and Eduardo Galeano. Interviews with smaller and lesser-known activist groups that are active in the current campaign have yielded very interesting conversations about the nature of political change in Uruguay and national identity. Two groups, Conbronca, a collective of digital artists and filmmakers, and Contraimpunidad, a small organization of activists interested in human rights in Mexico, are made up primarily of young Uruguayans who have no personal memory of the dictatorship themselves, but are actively trying to preserve and transmit the memory of state repression to their own generation. On May 20, I participated in the annual Marcha de Silencio, held every year in homage to Uruguay’s disappeared. There I had the chance to interview younger members of the PVP (Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo), one of the political parties most harshly repressed during the dictatorship, as well as two former political prisoners who I hope to speak to more in depth. In the next two weeks, I hope to visit important memory sites in Montevideo, develop a specific questionnaire to be completed by my interview subjects, and make contact with politicians and military figures on the other side of the debate. I’ve also created an experimental research blog for my project – it’s informal and I’m still figuring out how it should function (travel journal/news/analytical/hybrid?), but it would be great to have feedback from other students as my research progresses and inevitable challenges present themselves: http://memoryinmontevideo.blogspot.com/ Thanks!

Mari Hayman
MA Candidate, CLACS