Locating post‐colonial technoscience: through the lens of indigenous video

Abstract

This article draws on extended ethnographic inquiry and mobilizes a post‐colonial geopolitics of representation to narrate two different, but intersecting, stories about academic advocacy, indigenous activism, and the cultural politics of development in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. In addition to describing how communication technologies reached indigenous communities during moments of time characterized by auspicious shifts in state–society relations, these stories discuss the collaborative cultural work undertaken with these machines. The aim of this story telling is twofold. One goal is to position indigenous media makers not only as cultural brokers, but also as authoritative producers of knowledge about indigeneity. The second, related goal is to suggest strategies for reconfiguring the cultural geographies of technoscience so that it becomes a more inclusive endeavor.

Keywords:

• indigeneity
• technoscience
• video
• Mexico
• neoliberalism
• post‐colonial

Acknowledgements

A Dissertation Research Grant (no. SES‐0136035) from the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Studies Program supported substantial portions of this project. I am also grateful to the reviewers, especially Suzanne Moon and Martin Collins, who read and most helpfully commented on this essay. It is far more difficult to articulate how much I appreciate the kind generosity of the people whose ideas and lives I discuss here. Without their interest in my inquiries and willingness to share their time and thoughts, I would have nothing to say.

Notes

1. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity.

2. Sundberg, ‘Masculinist Epistemologies’ and ‘Looking for the Critical Geographer.’

3. Field, ‘Mired Positionings.’

4. Dove, ‘Indigenous People and Environmental Politics.’

5. Turnbull, ‘Introduction: Futures for indigenous knowledges,’ 3. See also the collection of essays found in the special issues of Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning, and Futures Studies that Turnbull is introducing, most especially Sillitoe and Marzano, ‘Future of Indigenous Knowledge Research in Development.’

6. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 154.

7. Largely for its visual impact, I chose to include the hyphen in post‐colonial. I think that rather than demarcating tidy historical epochs or heralding the end of colonialism, post‐colonial implies a desire to ‘post,’ in the sense of leaving behind, Eurocentric practices of knowledge production (cf. Hall, ‘When was “the Post‐Colonial”?,’ 254 and Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post‐Colonial,”’ 108). Since post‐colonial theory centers ‘the complex ways that the past inheres in the present’ (Jackson and Jacobs, ‘Postcolonialism and the Politics of Race,’ 3), the hyphen helps highlight how – despite our best efforts to enable this movement ‘beyond’ – the neo‐colonial keeps on coming (Hall, ‘When was “the Post‐Colonial”?,’ 249 and 254).

8. Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’ and ‘The Prose of Counter‐insurgency.’ Sen, ‘Subaltern Studies.’

9. Cf. Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History.’

10. In addition to Said, Orientalism, see Jacobs, ‘(Post)Colonial Spaces,’ and Rattansi, ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents,’ and Said, Culture and Imperialism.

11. For studies of the gendered nature of colonialism, see McClintock, Imperial Leather; Pratt, Imperial Eyes; and Mills, ‘Gender and Colonial Space.’

12. Dwyer and Jones, ‘White Socio‐spatial Epistemology,’ 210.

13. Ibid., 213.

14. Barnett, ‘Impure and Worldly Geography.’

15. Ibid., 243.

16. Ibid., 245 (emphasis in original).

17. Ibid., 240–2.

18. Ibid., 248.

19. Slater, ‘Post‐colonial Questions,’ 668.

20. Rattansi, ‘Postcolonialism and its Discontents.’

21. Hall, ‘When was “the Post‐Colonial”?’, 255.

22. For an especially rabid attack along both of these lines, see Eagleton, ‘The Gaudy Supermarket.’ See also this eloquent reading of Eagleton's agitation: Wright, ‘Centrifugal Logics.’

23. Hall, ‘When was “the Post‐Colonial”?’, 244 and 258–9.

24. Ibid., 258 (emphasis in original). See also McClintock, Imperial Leather.

25. Smith, ‘Chips Off the Old Ice Block.’

26. Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post‐Colonial,”’ 110.

27. Mitchell, ‘Different Diasporas.’ Jackson and Jacobs. ‘Postcolonialism and the Politics of Race.’

28. Radcliffe, ‘Different Heroes,’ reminds us to not assume that all marginalized voices, even if located in the same periphery, are equally positioned.

29. Radcliffe (‘Popular and State Discourses of Power,’ 238) provides an overview of how ‘in discursive, practical and ideological work done by power, the spatialities of power are spatialities of resistance, each operating simultaneously at a number of different sites, and constituting subjects in the interstices of cross‐cutting orders: “domination” and “resistance” are relational.’ Radcliffe also goes on to note that ‘the rejection of the binary of domination/resistance leaves in place the more difficult analytical and methodological aspect of identifying and explaining the different geographies and dynamics of co‐existing (and at times contradictory) powers. This will require detailed and substantial ethnographic analysis, in which the nature of the will to order can be examined at the same time as the diverse types of disruption (‘resistance’) to that will to order are elucidated’ (ibid.). See also Moore, ‘Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place,’ for just such an ethnographically rich illustration of the impossibility of isolated, autonomous realms of resistance.

30. Barnett, ‘Sing Along with the Common People,’ 151.

31. Slater, ‘Post‐colonial Questions for Global Times,’ 669.

32. Mallon, ‘The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies,’ 1506.

33. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 89.

34. Ibid., 3.

35. Ibid., 3 and 11.

36. Haraway uses the phrase New World Order as a shorthand evocation of current capitalist configurations and the military industrial machinations of its historically and epistemologically dominant Christian leadership.

37. Particularly worried about ‘a conspicuous absence of serious citizen agency shaping science and technology policy’ in the USA, Haraway lobbies for the critical science politics of a technoscientific democracy. She spells out what she means by this: ‘Technoscientific democracy does not necessarily mean an antimarket politics, and certainly not an antiscience politics. But such democracy does require a critical science politics at the national, as well as may other kinds of local, level. “Critical” means evaluative, public multiactor, mutliagenda, oriented to equality and heterogeneous well‐being’ (Modest_Witness, 95).

38. McAfee, ‘Corn Culture and Dangerous DNA.’ Dyer and Yúnez‐Naude, ‘NAFTA and Conservation of Maize Diversity.’

39. González, Zapotec Science, 259 (my emphasis).

40. Ibid., 261–2.

41. Himpele, ‘Packaging Indigenous Media,’ 357.

42. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 230.

43. Ginsburg, ‘“From Little Things, Big Things Grow,”’ 119.

44. I (like Wortham, ‘Narratives of Location,’ 35) draw my definition of the complexities to which the concept of indigenous media refers directly from Ginsburg, ‘Aboriginal Media,’ 558.

‘The term indigenous media comprehends the complex nature of the phenomena it signifies. The first word – “indigenous” – respects the understandings of those Aboriginal producers who identify themselves as “First Nations” or “Fourth World People.” These categories index the political circumstances shared by indigenous people around the globe. Whatever their cultural differences, such groups all struggle against a legacy of disenfranchisement of the lands, societies and cultures by colonizing European societies, such as Australia, the United States, Canada, and most of Latin America. The second word – “media” – whether referring to satellites or VCRs, evokes the huge institutional structures of the television and film industries that tend to overwhelm the local cultural specificities of small‐scale societies while privileging commercial interests that demand large audiences as a measure of success. While the institutional dimensions of media – especially television – shadow their intersection with the lives of indigenous people, they do not determine the outcomes. Thus, the term indigenous media reminds us that this work is part of broader movements for cultural autonomy and self‐determination that exist in complex tension with the structures of national governments, international politics, and the global circulation of communications technology.’

45. Protz, ‘Video, Gender, and Participatory Development.’

46. Annabelle Sreberny‐Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi (‘Small Media and Revolutionary Change,’ 221) develop the concept of ‘revolutionary small media’ or ‘non‐mass media’ to describe an oppositional public sphere that works to reconfigure symbolic values through cultural communications operating largely outside of a repressive state's purveyance. As will soon be clear, however, while indigenous video‐mediated activism certainly can reconfigure cultural politics with calls for decolonization, it rarely emerges without entangling somehow with state formations. And so, while they operate as smaller‐sized, non‐mass media that contribute to oppositional cultural politics, indigenous videos are not really revolutionary in the sense that Sreberny‐Mohammadi and Mohammadi use in their examination of how small media contributed to the popular foment that eventually overthrew the Shah in Iran.

Speaking of Iran: because of the utilization of internet‐media technologies to visualize and comment upon current events, the recent oppositional movement challenging the 2009 elections is also different from much indigenous mobilization of small media. Most indigenous media projects – especially outside of the North American and Pacific contexts of production – unfold in historically marginalized regions characterized by greater challenges to accessing communication technologies and disseminating visualizations via the internet.

47. Turner, ‘Representation, Polyphony, and the Construction of Power,’ 230. See also Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters,’ 309–15.

48. Ibid., 232.

49. Ginsburg, ‘Aboriginal Media,’ 559.

50. Wortham, ‘Narratives of Location’; Smith, ‘The Search for Well‐Being’ and Meditating Indigenous Identity.

51. Loretta Todd is quoted in Ginsburg, ‘Resources of Hope,’ 42–3. Although I find this a mighty handy comparison to make for telling this story, I also recognize how it is awfully tricky to uphold such a tidy differentiation in many circumstances. In a nutshell, I define activists as those who lobby for self‐identity and I define advocates as those who lobby on the behalf of the identity and livelihood of others. See also: Turner, ‘Representation, Polyphony, and the Construction of Power’; Michaels, ‘The Social Organisation of an Aboriginal Video Workplace’; Prins, ‘Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex’; Ginsburg, ‘“From Little Things, Big Things Grow.”’ Wortham, ‘Narratives of Location.’

52. For a glimpse of this course, see the photo essay found at http://www.uky.edu/AS/Geography/Resources/International/Mexico/summer99/uksummer.htm (accessed August 7, 2009).

53. Hernández‐Díaz, Reclamos de la Identidad, 28–9.

54. This sketch of the Consejo Supremo is drawn from ibid., 27–35 and Dietz, ‘From Indigenismo to Zapatismo,’ 44. See also Esteva, ‘The Revolution of the New Commons,’ n. 15, 301.

55. Esteva, ‘The Revolution of the New Commons,’ 195.

56. Durand Alcántara, ‘Algunas Consideraciones,’ 51 and 54. Carlos Durand Alcántara is a rural sociologist and professor of agrarian law at the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo (in Veracruz) as well as professor of Ciencias Sociales at the UNAM. When his 1989 article (cited above) was published in the Revista Geografica Venezolana, a publication of the Instituto de Geografía y Conservación de Recursos Naturales de la Facultad de Ciencias Forestales at the Universidad de los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, Durand Alcántara held a post‐doc position there that was funded by the Ford Foundation. Since then he has gone on to publish several books, such as: La Lucha Campesina En Oaxaca y Guerrero, 1978–1987 (1989); Derechos Indios En Mexico – Derechos Pendientes (1994); Derecho Nacional, Derechos Indios y Derecho Consuetudinario Indigena: Los Triquis de Oaxaca, Un Estudio de Caso (1998); Hacia Una Fundamentacion Teorica De La Costumbre Juridica India (2000; with Miguel Samano and Gerardo Gomez Gonzalez); and Educacion Agricola, Pueblos Indios y Nueva Ruralidad en Los Umbrales del Siglo XXI (2001; with Miguel Samano).

Durand Alcántara (‘Algunas Consideraciones,’ 54) also links the Sandoval family to the Partido Auténtico de la Revolución (PARM), a political party formed in 1954 by dissident members of the PRI and until the late 1970s was one of only three authorized political parties in opposition to the PRI. Although Durand Alcántara's comments – determined to demonstrate that Sandoval's political engagements were largely commercial – suggest that PARM's opposition was purely cosmetic, PARM was one of the parties that joined the broad coalition that backed Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (the son of President Cárdenas and himself a former governor of Michoacán) Presidential bid in 1988.

Finally, it is worth noting that the way in which Durand Alcántara talks about the Sandoval family shifts over time from the outright assertion that family members were caciques who monopolized trade (‘Algunas Consideraciones,’ 51 and 54) to the observation, complete with ‘scare quotes,’ that ‘some campesinos define them as “caciques”’ (Durand Alcántara, Derecho Nacional, Derechos Indios, 307–8), which follows reliance on Marcos Sandoval (the son) for access to important community records and affirmative mention of the cultural center in Chicahuaxtla.

57. Although I recognize how using his first name positions this man on a level distinct from the scholars whose work I reference, I persist with this naming practice in order to distinguish him from his father who had the same first name. Additionally, because over the course of four years of fieldwork in Oaxaca I spoke often and at length with Marcos, it is odd not to use his first name, despite the way it distinguishes between a partner in theorization with whom many conversations and cervezas were shared and a researcher whose scholarship I read and cite, usually without having any social engagement with them.

58. There was an official history of the Banco Nacional de Crédito Rural on the entity's website, but like the institution itself, it has been liquidated. To glimpse the remnants, see the few remaining bits of its website: http://www.banrural.gob.mx/ (accessed November 22, 2009).

59. CONASUPO stands for Compañía Nacional de Subsistemas Populares and generally refers to the state funded stores established (in lieu of the agricultural subsidies that were being drastically reduced by neoliberal reforms) in communities to sell basic commodities at cost. COMPLAR refers to the programs collected beneath the moniker of Coordinadora General del Plan Nacional de Zonas Marginadas y Grupos Deprimidos, and as the name suggests, most of this programming was directed towards indigenous communities. Because these programs offered assistance through only nominally changed corporatist channels, albeit with increased discursive recognition of greater local participation, it is often considered a later stage of indigenismo, el indigenismo de participación (Hernández‐Díaz, Reclamos de la Identidad, 33–4 and Fox, The Politics of Food in Mexico, 188–205).

60. San Juan Copala is another Triqui community, which at this time – the mid 1980s – was the site of violent confrontations between organizations affiliated with the PRI and oppositional organizations such as the Movimiento Unificado de Lucha Triqui (MULT) (Hernández‐Díaz, Reclamos de la Identidad, 85–97). I am unaware what role the Partido Auténtico de la Revolución, to which Durand Alcántara links Marcos and his family (see endnote 56 above), played in these conflicts. But it's clear that Marcos did not stay long in San Juan Copala.

61. Señora Sandoval's observations are included in a report on a three‐day forum that brought together 30 indigenous women from 16 different ethnic groups from nine different Mexican states (not to mention the feminist scholars who coordinated the event and the report). Titled La Mujer y los Derechos Fundamentales de los Pueblos Indígenas, this ‘seminario latinoamericano’ took place in Oaxaca de Juárez on July 2–4, 1993. It was made possible through the cooperative efforts of employees of INI's Programa de Trabajo con Mujeres Indígenas, y la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos como patrocinadora de la Federación de Mujeres Universitarias, and the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer y la Familia, which is housed within the Oaxaca bureau of DIF (the Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia).

Most recently (1997), Señora Sandoval's commentary was published as a chapter titled ‘Mujeres triquies’ in the book version of this international forum's proceedings, La condición de la mujer indígena y sus derechos fundamentales: Seminario internacional (edited by Patricia Galeana, a historian and then President of the Federación Mexicana de Universitarias).

62. These outlets are FONART is the Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artesanías (housed with SEDESOL, the Secretaría de Desarrollo Social) and ARIPO (Artesanías y Industrias Populares del Estado de Oaxaca), a state bureau dedicated to supporting the sales of art and craftwork produced in Oaxaca.

63. Sandoval, ‘Peripecias y consecuencias,’ 84.

64. In 1979, INI established its first radio station, a 5000 watt AM channel called XEZV ‘La Voz de la Montaña’ in Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero. A batch of four others, of which XETLA ‘La Voz de la Mixteca’ was one, came on air in 1982. See Hayes, Radio Nation and Castells Talens, ‘When Our Media Belong to the State.’

65. Interview with Marcos Sandoval in October 2001. Like the translations of written texts, all translations of interviews undertaken in Spanish are my own.

To hear more about what Marcos has to say about XETLA, listen to the radio feature found here: http://www.prx.org/pieces/24140-story-in-sound-indigenous-radio-in-oaxaca-mexico (accessed November 22, 2009).

66. Eduardo Valenzuela briefly mentions, as an example of a successful but transitory transference of communication technologies to indigenous communities, the radio program ‘Camino Andado’ that was designed and produced by Triquis from Chicahuaxtla (Valenzuela, ‘La Radiodifusión Indigenista,’ 59). His brief review of the program's content does not say anything about music programming. Instead it suggests that 30 programs about weaving techniques, weavers' troubles with commercialization and accessing materials, the symbolic meaning of the woven symbols, and the importance of weaving to the entire community were produced. He also notes that ‘After a time, the series was no longer produced because of certain problems with the team that was responsible for making it, as well as supporting and training the population. Now the women that were involved in the production are leaving it behind with new techniques and a training program.’

I have no idea how thorough is Valenzuela's look at ‘Camino Andado,’ but its portrait of the program – and its termination – is clearly (and rather drastically) different from the one Marcos imparted to me, which did not even mention the program's demise.

67. This paragraph draws heavily on the paper by Michelle Petrotta, ‘Audiovisual Activism for the Revaloration of Culture in San Andrés Chicahuaxtla’ written in December 2001. Like me, Michelle came to Oaxaca to study at the Center for Intercultural Encounters and Dialogue (CIED) and through this transnationally‐funded NGO (which orbits around the ideas and socio‐spatial relations of Gustavo Esteva), Michelle met Marcos Sandoval and stayed for a spell in Chicahuaxtla as a guest of members of his family. I procured a copy of the paper courtesy of Marcos, who gave me a copy of the paper (several months after Michelle had written it) because he thought it might interest me. He was most certainly correct.

68. Petrotta, ‘Audiovisual Activism,’ 2–5.

69. Marcos quoted by Durand Alcántara, Derecho Nacional, 307.

70. Fausto Sandoval quoted in Esteva, ‘The Revolution of the New Commons,’ 196.

71. For example, Bonfil, ‘Del indigenismo de la revolución.’ See also Deitz, ‘From Indigenismo to Zapatismo’ and González, ‘From Indigenismo to Zapatismo,’ 144.

72. For examples, see Stavenhagen, ‘Classes, Colonialism, and Acculturation’ and a 1981 special issue of the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales titled ‘La cuestión Étnica en América Latina.’

73. For example, Bonfil and Rojas Arevena, América Latina. Rodríguez, Imperialismo y Descolonización.

74. Varese, Proyectos Étnicos y Proyectos Nacionales; Bataillon, Indianidad, Etnocidio, Indigenismo; Alcina, Indianismo e indigenismo en América.

75. For the record, Stavenhagen earned his BA in 1951 from the University of Chicago, his MA in Social Anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City in 1958, and his PhD in Sociology from the Universidad de Paris in 1965.

76. Stavenhagen, ‘Decolonizing Applied Social Science,’ 335.

77. Ibid., 339.

78. In addition to his long‐time position as a sociologist at El Colegio de México, Stavenhagen has contributed his dynamic presence to the composition of the Convention 169 by the UN's International Labour Organization's (see Stavenhagen, ‘Reunión de Expertos’), as well as projects funded by UNICEF and UNESCO as well as various international Human Rights initiatives (e.g. Nagenast, Stavenhagen, and Kearney, Human Rights and Indigenous Workers). During the 1990s, he was on the staff of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and continued to publish (see Stavenhagen, ‘El Sistema Internacional’ for just one example). In 2001, he was named to a new position with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples.

79. Reuter, Indigenismo, Pueblo y Cultura.

80. The following is drawn from the most refined version of Bonfil's famous theoretical‐methodological essay ‘Lo propio y lo ajeno: Una aproximación al problema del control cultural,’ which was published posthumously as ‘La teoría del control cultural en el estudio de procesos étnicos.’ Particularly influential to my rendition of it here is the diagram of these differentiated cultural elements that is exactly reproduced in every one of these publications. For the record: lo propio is something owned or innate, and lo ajeno is something alien in the sense of being foreign.

81. Examples of such scholarship include: Bonfil, Nuevas Identidades Culturales and Rosales, Cultura, Sociedad Civil.

82. Indeed it was my introduction to the cultural politics of indigenous identity during the University of Kentucky's first Field Study Course in the summer of 1999.

83. Bonfil, Mexico Profundo, 173.

84. The source of this first camera was confirmed in an interview with Hector García Sandoval (July 2004). Just below I turn to Hector's role in videos produced in Chicahuaxtla.

85. Interview with Marcos Sandoval, November 2001.

86. To learn a bit about Lechuaga's life and her collection, which is housed in her Mexico City home, see http://www.mexicofile.com/ruthdlechugamuseummexicoslittleknowngem.htm (accessed August 8, 2009).

87. You can see this photo at http://www.uv.mx/popularte/esp/mfoto.php?phid=92 (accessed November 23, 2009). It is also reproduced (without caption – although the title page notes Lechuga and others' photographs are included) in Durand Alcántara, Derecho Nacional, 107. See endnote 56 for details regarding Durand Alcántara.

88. Interview with Hector García Sandoval, July 2004.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid.

91. Wortham, ‘Narratives of Location,’ 177.

92. Ibid., 178–9.

93. Ibid., 237.

94. Esteva, ‘Reclaiming Our Freedom to Learn.’

95. Esteva, ‘Basta! Mexican Indians Say Enough!’ and ‘Development.’

96. Esteva, ‘The Revolution of the New Commons,’ 194–201.

97. Ibid., 196–7.

98. Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post‐Modernism, 56–7.

99. Ibid., 111. Elsewhere (‘The Revolution of the New Commons,’ 190) Esteva shares the same remark, but instead of naming Marcos, only noting that it was said by an indigenous leader. Stories are rarely told the same way twice, even when written with word processors.

100. To catch a glimpse of the sort of work Marcos oversaw as director at this museum, see the collection of essays (in Spanish) edited by Gustavo Esteva and Catherine Marielle and published by Culturas Populares e Indígenas (note the newly expanded name of this government agency). Like the museum exhibition that accompanied its publication, the book is titled Sin Maíz, No Hay Pais (2003). The first section includes a chapter written by Marcos, ‘El Maíz y los pueblos Indios.’ You'll find it included in the book's first section, which is available online at www.culturaspopulareseindigenas.gob.mx/pdf/cap1_maiz.pdf (accessed November 23, 2009).

101. Anyone wishing to access anything – from the video library to the video recording, viewing, and editing equipment, was obliged to first submit a letter explaining who they were and why they wished to engage these materials. In a nutshell, things had become much more bureaucratic compared to the CVI under the tenure of Guillermo (1994–1997) and Juan José (1997–2002).

102. You can read (in Spanish) about CLACPI on the organization's website, http://www.clacpi.org/. A report written in English about the 2006 CLACPI festival in Oaxaca is found here: http://www.nativenetworks.si.edu/Eng/blue/clacpi_06.htm (both accessed November 23, 2009).

103. Sandoval, ‘Discurso Pronunciado ante los Reyes de España,’ 8–9. This text is a transcription of what Marcos said when he greeted Spain's royal family when they visited Oaxaca in January 1990. The portion I quote here is also quoted in Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post‐Modernism, 57; Esteva ‘The Revolution of the New Commons,’ 197–8; and Varese ‘Indigenous Epistemologies,’ 277.

104. Varese ‘Indigenous Epistemologies.’

105. Much appreciation to Martin Collins for reminding me of this.