Marisol de La Cadeña_Comments Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State

Comments: Ambiguity and Contradictionin the Analysis of Race and the State

The past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens todisappear irretrievably.Walter Benjamin

fflhebeghnerwhohaslearnedanewla^^Karl Marx

TheattempttQ talk about new events wih ckl language and meanings, stretches thehn-gjageanddevdcp6newniearings.William Roseberry1

These four articles explore from different temporal and thematic anglesthe complex trajectory of modernity in Guatemala. While Todd Iittle-Sieboldand John Watanabe analyze two distinct moments in the transition from colo-nial to early Republican Guatemala, Abigail Adams and Christa Little-Sieboldare both concerned with the tensions between contemporary local and na-tional images and processes of modernization. Notwithstanding this tempo-ral divide, all four articles are situated at the disciplinary crossroads of anthro-pology and history. Therefore, all four are concerned with the historidzationof meaning. John Watanabe asks about the cultural politics of visitas by jefespoliticos to remote villages such as (in the particular case he studies)Huehuetenanago; Christa and Todd Little-Siebold inspect the meaning ofidentity labels in several local villages while also questioning the prevalence ofdominant Indian/ladino dichotomies as the sole classificatory system; AbigailAdams is concerned with the intertwined modern and traditional meaningsthat a group of Q'eqchi' Maya assign to the image of "roads."

As it is in these four articles, "meaning" has also been a central concern ofanthropologists. However, for a long time in most ethnographic works mean-

Thejournul of Lain American /l/7/vt>po/oy6(2):2'i2-266 copyright 2001, American Anthropological Association

252 The Journal of Latin American Anthropology

Marisol de la CadenaUniversity of North Carolina,Chapel Hill

ingeither as text, structure, or functionloomed alone, floating in a defini-tion of culture as "mental structure" or "system of symbols" that lacked theforce of actors and was devoid of the social relations through which signifi-cation was created, transmitted, rejected, or accepted. Following several pio-neering efforts (Wolf 1982; Cohn 1987; Mintz 1985; Sahlins 1985) we an-thropologists have sought to remedy these problems by introducing bothhistory and power in our analysis. At the same time historians were trying torecover for their discipline the notion of culture, and as a result we have metthem halfway. As Watanabe mentions, the initial period of this encounterimplied an interesting paradox. On the one hand anthropologists, searchingto integrate the non-European world into the global forces of historical time,appeared to neglect local cultural histories, or to subordinate its dynamics tothe forces of world capitalism.2 In turn, historians' search of culture usuallytrapped them in actorless webs of meaning or dumped them into deep andobscure structures devoid of any sense of process.3

In spite of the initial frustrations, these efforts have resulted in a differentkind of encounter, at a rich inter-disciplinary crossroads that makes of his-tory and culture inseparable, mutually infiltrating categories. The condition forthis encounter is a redefinition of culture as socially constituting and sociallyconstituted, and of history not only as written but also, and critically, as writ-ing (cf. Roseberry 1989). Thus redefined, history is viewed as a subject repletewith culture, and meaning is conceived as historically achieved and explained.Borrowing from Benjamin (1969:261), at these crossroads history becomes asubject "whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled with thepresence of the now," where the "now" does not refer to a chronologicallydefined present but to significant and signifying moments filled with the pres-ence ofrneaning-gMng, socially related, agents/actions. From this viewpoint, historydefies a definition that confines it to the past, allows for ethnography to beabout more than the present, and lets us anthropologists write ethnographic

Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State 253

histories of de-reified pasts and presents that are replete with signifying (andthus material) presences. In one way or another, all four articles contribute tofurther these crossroads as they attempt to understand how actions, mean-ings, and people are mutually constituted. Specifically, all four articles remindus that the process of modernity in Latin America did not homogenize mean-ings or peoples.

Illustrative of this heterogeneity of meaning, and of Mintz's sharp insightthat "people's agreeing on what something is, is not the same as their agreeingon what it means" (1985:158) is Abigail Adams's analysis of the Tzuultaq'a,the mountain valley spirits which Q'eqchi' individuals from San Juan Chamelco(Verapaz) identify as "roads" and travelers. Yet their specific meanings changeas SanJuanenos latch the Tzuultaq'a onto different local events, persons, orsymbols thatlike roads and travelersconnect San Juan with outside places(such as the United States, Guatemala City, or the Peten). Powerful in Adams'sanalysis is her treatment of the Tzuultaq'a as "myth-historical" categories whosemeanings are historically negotiated in association with locally significant mo-ments, persons, and processes. Through Adams's analysis San Juanenos ap-pear as representing their own history with their own imagery, but still con-nected with national and global events, in a relation of subordination, whichhowever does not imply the disappearance of local interpretations. Rather,through the Tzuultaq'a the Q'eqchi' formulate local resignifications of "out-side" occurrences, and thus present them as historically integral to San JuanChamelco. I would like to think of the Tzuultaq'a as the expression of aspecific form of historical Maya consciousness, that while integrating itselfwith Guatemala, produces an alternative modernity that, for example, doesnot separatelike Western forms of modernity do"religious" from "non-religious," or "material" from "symbolic." Adams's paper presents some ofthe stories that fill Guatemalan modernity with competing possibilities, andmake its articulation ceaselessly contingent, subject to the works of power-situated (powerful and powerless) actors. The texture of this beautiful papercould have gained an extra dimension if the author would have shared withus more of her ethnography. If, for example, instead of presenting the dif-ferent meanings already attached to "roads" and Tzuultaq'a, she would haveled the reader through the social interactions that created, interpreted, trans-formed and reproduced these meanings. How do individual and differenti-ated Q'eqchi' (rather than Q'eqchi' in general) decide which "outside" eventsto appropriate? How do they incorporate them in local processes of signifi-cation? In a nutshell: I was left longing for more of the keen ethnographicwork, and the linguistic talent, that is at the heart of Adams's work.

To get at the heart of meaning, and to do so historically (even whenwriting about the presentlike Adams does) is one of the drives of current


antliropological works. I see John Watanabe's "procedural culture" as an in-teresting methodological proposal in that direction. It is a conceptual tool thatboth historians and anthropologists can use, like he says, to read historicaldocuments with an ethnographer's eyes, and hence reinstate cultureand thusthe process of meaningin analyses of power, and thus. The bottom linequestion can thus be: how does power become culturally visible to groupsthat see themselves as different?1 Rather than looking at the ways in which thegroups interact separately, Watanabe's "procedural culture" is a forceful claimto look for the common cultural grounds where historically differentiatedpeoples interact. Implicit in this claim is the important idea that even as powerexceeds cultural boundaries and articulates unequal relations among differen-tiated groups, this does not preclude the formation of fields of significationacross such differences. Procedural culture thus complicates the idea of dif-ference by suggesting that it emerges from co-participation in the same his-torical timethe Benjaminian "time of the now." Situated in this time, actorsengage (albeit unequally) in processes of signification and re-signification thattranspire across their social, cultural, economic, and ideological differences.Emerging from such processes, social relations are multi-layered, and theircomplex heteroglossia is a far cry from neatly coinciding with the grid ofsocial differences. As Watanabe's brief historical-ethnographic analysis shows,the participation of differentiated social actors in a network of historicallycommon relations, should prevent us from mechanically assuming that cul-tural differences among groups account for homogeneity of interests withinthem.

Along with this inspiring potential, I find some problems with Watanabe'sproposal.

Obviously, not everything about culture is shared meaningfulnessandthe author knows that. It seems to me that his emphasis on "meaningfulness"has eclipsed disagreement from being methodologically included in "proce-dural culture." He writes:

In any given interaction, such personalized understandings give interlocutors arange of conventional options that extend as far across their linguistic, cultural,and personal knowledge as imagination and intelligibilityaWow. What actuallygets said and done, and especially t/ieniean^^aflTibutec/tD it, take shape againstthis backdrop of knowing familiarity with what might have reasonably orunreasonably happened instead, in this and analogous contexts. Constrainedmote by the limits ofmWTingfUness&i^i is, rathomahfe intelligibility^ ratherthanby any strict conformity to specific meanings or opinions, individuals'conventional understandings provide ample latitude for both conformityand contention. (145) [emphasis added]


Although in many passages Watanabe warns us that understandings canbe different across groups, misunderstandings seem to be absent from his pro-cedural culture. Useful in this context is Roseberry's (1989) idea that talkingabout new events with old language and meanings stretches the language anddevelops new meanings, even if at the risk of initialand even enduringmisunderstandings. I would suggest that rather than being constrained by thelimits meaningfulness, it is by disregarding those limits, and thus producingmisunderstandings people produce difference itself, and not only interact acrossit. These moments that entail the production of difference occur relentlesslywithin shared (yet differentiated) cultural spaces, and can be included inWatanabe's procedural culture by focusing on how meaningless proceduresacquire cultural visibilitythrough mistakes and disagreements on their mean-ingand are thereon accepted, rejected, transformed, and may even as re-main meaningless, yet they are present. My second criticism relates toWatanabe's interpretation of hegemony. like him, I think that hegemony can-not take the conceptual place of culture. Yet, by the same token, I do not seethe conceptual or methodological need to use procedural culture instead ofhegemony. I disagree with analyses that assume that "resistance comes frombelow" and "imposition from above"and heartily coincide with Watanabe'scriticism of such conceptualizations of hegemony. Yet those are far frombeing the only ones. On the contrary, there are myriad ways in which hege-mony has been used both by anthropologists and historians. Certainly someof them, drawing from Raymond Williams, define hegemony in ways thatoverlap with culture.5 Others assume a polar opposition between state andpopular resistance.6 And others (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 199D distin-guish hegemony from ideology, and from culture. However, like with anyother abstraction, hegemony does not have a fixed definition, nor can it be"applied" like a free-floating analytical device innocent of historical content(cf. Sayer 1987). I would argue the problem is not with using or not usinghegemony (or any other concept for that matter) but with the historicityorlack thereofof its definition or, even more so, of its usage. Thus, ratherthan the concept, John Watanabe's perspective is critical of a specific method-ological deployment of the notion of hegemony: one that mechanically imaginescultural differences as polarized fields of resistance and oppression. Yet, in-formed by a historical perspective, and distinguished from culturewhichfrom a Gramscian perspective is one of the fields in which it operateshegemony can also be a very effective conceptual tool topreciselyundopolarities. In my recent study of peasant upheavals in Cuzco, to use an ex-ample that I am obviously familiar with, I used hegemony to understand amulti-stranded conflict in which indigenous political leaders demanded local-level access to the state (rather than simply opposing it) by, among other things,


proposing a definition of Indianness that had room for literacy. This strugglefor access to the state and for literacy contested dominant definitions ofIndians as illiterate and that excluded Indians from official political participa-tion on this basis. The indigenous struggle, however, did not have a polarantagonist, and it was waged within the discourse of progress which indig-enous Andean politicians conjured up to demand participation in the stateand to insist on their rights to citizenship as literate indigenous Peruvians. Inthis use of hegemony I was inspired by current conceptual proposals (Hall1986; Williams 1977). But my main source of inspiration came from Gramsd'stexts (and footnotes) in the Prison Notebooks and from some ethnographichistories (Fox 1989; Feierman 1990). From these I assembled a notion ofhegemony which was simultaneously an abstraction and a methodologicaltool that I used to analyze the moves of concrete historical agentsindig-enous and non-indigenous intellectualsacting in and across specific culturalfields. Following these dominant and subordinate agents ethnographicallyand using theory as prelude, rather than as end in my historical inquiry (cf.Corrigan and Sayer 1985)it was impossible for me to inscribe state officialsor "Indians" into ready-made abstract scripts of simplified resistance anddomination. On the contrary, I was able to do what Watanabe claims is notdone through hegemony: find alliances across differences, antagonisms withinsimilarities, and therefore multiple trends and possibilities for negotiation.More importantly, I was able to observe a complex panorama in whichsocial relations were articulated through multi-layered links of power, wheredominant and subordinate sides, while structurally related, did not act in uni-dimensional fashion: for example, either dominating or resisting.

From my perspective, the visitas by jefes politicos can be analyzed insimilar terms: as part of the process of a transition to modernity, which inPeru and Guatemala, as in most of Latin America, entailed the simultaneoustransformation of colonial subjects into modern citizens and the productionof modern nation-states. Both processes were shadowed by notions andfeelings of race and progress which, albeit from different perspectives, werelived by assorted populations whose previous official and unofficial identi-tiesas Todd Iittle-Siebold explains in his articlewere unsettled, preciselyas part of the process of producing both citizens and the republican state.Following some of Watanabe's suggestions, I would argue that "proceduralculture" in the 19th century, was a shared field of signification, in whose pro-duction participated individuals enacting relationships prescribed by old iden-tities and by the need to produce new ones. These individuals engaged inproducing a republican state in which old differences were being transformedunder the influence of liberal agents, which however continued to partake ofcolonial structures of feelings and power. Thus historicized, this context does


not lend itself to simplistic oppositional relationships between "the state" and"the people." Moreover, rather than choosing between procedural culture orhegemony, both notions can be combined to follow the complex processesby which "the state" was concretely (yet inchoately) produced by central au-thorities from the capital of Guatemala, by jefes politicos, and by local villag-ers as they interacted in diverse scenarios like the visitas that Watanabe docu-ments. As rituals of state-formation, the visitas were arenas for the inscriptionof citizenship, and spaces where forms of ruling and meanings of identitieswere negotiated among diverse actors, whose political agendas did not over-lap with the consensually defined "cultural differences," even as the relation-ships among them were organized by uneven distributions of power.

As Todd Little-Siebold illustrates, the efforts to polarize the differencesbetween state and people and to fixate the identities of the latter as either Indianor ladino stemmed from policy attempts to modernize Guatemala. Toddlittle-Siebold's article analyzes one of the most intriguing periods in the his-tory of Latin America: the decades that stretched from Independence in the1820s, to the latter decades of the 19th century. During this incipient republi-can and hardly (or only partially) post-colonial moment ideas about the pos-sibility for the existence of Latin American nations were both conspicuouslyprofessed in public oral and written demonstrations, and profoundly doubtedin the intimacy of homes. The latter is an aspect that Benedict Anderson(1991) missed, for he built his representations of the Creole pioneers of na-tionalism by investigating primarily the public arena of the period, where thecomraderie and optimism (required to transform the multifarious castas intoundifferentiated Americans) seemingly displaced feelings of exclusion andpessimism. Yet, a cursory look into private life can reveal the intense anxietythat the reverberations of the European Enlightenment created in LatinAmerican elites, as the increasing demands for secularization, rationality, andscientific progress convinced them of the dangers of backwardness, andeven degeneration, if they did not control the Indians, blacks (and their fearedmixtures) that peopled their newly independent region.

Born in trepidation, Latin American nationalism was not only a de-colo-nizing venture. (Mignolo 2000; Klor de Alva 1992) The almost two centuriesspanning since its early inception to its relatively systematic implementation,were also crucial years for the conceptual-political reordering of the world.Thus situated, Latin American nationalism becomes a quasi-oxymoronic ven-ture produced in dialogue with, and even adjusting to, an international colo-nial capitalist order that organized profoundly hierarchical relations betweenEurope and the rest of the world, and was articulated by the emerging andintertwined discourses of race, civilization, and progress. Transferred to LatinAmerica, these discourses appropriated, rather than displaced, colonial cat-


egories of religious-based difference. Gradually, as they (and the labels at-tached to them) achieved meaningfulness, the new discourses of differencelevied newel significations on old identity labels.7 Thus, for example, the meaningof blood eventually changedfrom a representation of religious descent andlineage membership to instead mean the veins, the alleged biological carriersof inheritable traits. But it took a while for the old language of blood toacquire its new racial meanings, and even when it did, it did not necessarilyshed previous ones. Judging from the examples in Christa Little-Siebold'sarticle, even in 20th-century Guatemala blood has not become an exclusivebiological signifier but instead continues to connote ancestry and lineage mem-bership.

Thus, as Todd Little-Siebold argues, there is much to learn if we focuson continuity, for, as Marx suggested more than a century ago, "the beginnerwho has learnt another language always translates it to her mother tongue."And the language of calidadthe mother tongue of colonial Latin Americanidentitieswas neither simple, nor uniform as Todd Little-Siebold rightlystates. His contribution is precisely to highlight the geo-political complexitiesof identities, and therefore to call our attention to the difficulties of normal-izing Guatemalans into either Indians or Ladinos. Not only where there manyidentity labels in what was to become Guatemalathey also had differentlocal meanings, which as this author reminds us, may have well continued itsway (even if surreptitiously) into the newly minted Indian and Ladino identi-ties. But as Marx's quote also conveys, focusing on continuity alone, and look-ing for it mostly at the local (subordinate) level, may lead us to miss thecomplexity of the new classificatory order. Moreover, looking for "continu-ity" in the peripheries while assuming "change" in the center risks introducinganother set of dichotomies, which can rigidify our analysis. Thus, it becomesnecessary to look at how old categories and the classificatory orders to whichthey belonged acquired new meaningsthose infused to them by the lan-guage of racewithout necessarily shedding the old ones. And this occurredeverywherein centers and peripheries alike, where ever historically locatedpeople lived their everyday lives.

Andeanist historians working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries haverecently begun investigating the encounter between early colonial orders ofdifference (casta, calidad, honor, and linaje) and the modem notions of race thatemerged in those years. (Graubart 2001; OToole 2001; Burns 1999; Estenssoro2000). At the turn of the 19th centurythe budding years of Latin Americannations and liberalism"calidad" rivaled with, but was not displaced by "sci-entific education" as a marker of status. My own research suggests that ratherthan disappearing, early colonial orders of difference, and the labels attachedto them Omite/D, cuaiteron, mestizo, sakoatias, criollo, indio, indigena, ladino)dfc\ ncX


disappear. They did, however, grow with new meanings, as people and thestate (through its own people) interacted in a national and international systemthat was being re-arranged around the increasingly pervasive order of race.Worldwide this order was ambiguous. Among other aspects, it included cul-ture, biology, religion, nationality, as well as the continued effort to pull themapart, and thus to purify "race" from what it allegedly was not. Specifically, inLatin America the shift to "race" was a very impure process of moderniza-tion underpinned by old beliefs and actual hierarchies, which never succeededat separating "biology" from "culture." This ambiguity might have provedinstrumentalfor it allowed the emergence of a notion of whiteness thatwas more than skin-deep, and therefore "color" (or, more accurately, the lackof it) was the result of status, rather than its precondition. One of the mostinterestingif understatedfeatures of Todd Little-Siebold's article is pre-cisely that it underscores the conundrum that whiteness represented as a pos-sible identity for elite Guatemalans, those labeled Espanoles in the pre-Inde-pendence years. His list of "Identity Labels for the Kingdom of Guatemala,"implicitly shows that "whiteness" was not an official local identity. SinceEspanoles were not labeled white, under which guise where they incorpo-rated into Guatemalan nationalist discourse? Apparentlygiven the incipientstage of "whiteness" in America in generalnationalist Guatemalan eliteswere first incorporated into the "Ladino" category. This opens questions thathave yet to be answered: When does "whiteness" appear as a Guatemalanidentity? And then, what does it mean, and who is entitled to such label? InPeru it comes into sight hesitantly in the late 18th century, and then only withinlineages with long-standing Spanish and indigenous ancestries. By the end of19th century, Peruvian "whiteness" was a novel and uncomfortable category,that provoked assorted reactions in elite thinkers. While some limited it to thecoast (and even to Lima) and qualified it as having a particular hue, indeeddifferent from that of Euro-Americans, others questioned Peruvian formsof whiteness, presenting it as a foreign inclined, anti-nationalist fabrication.Embedded in vacillations, "whiteness" entered the 20th century as an unclear,even "foreign," categoryand, as Christa Little-Siebold's article suggests, itlingers as such. The "visible invisibility of whiteness" (in Guatemala, and inother places of Latin America) does not only correspond to the usual privi-lege of the center to go unnamed. It is also a result of its dubious genealogy,of its lack of clarity, and ultimately of people's generalized awareness thatlocal "whiteness" does not match dominant Euro-American versions of it.Neither of this, of course, precluded the emergence of "white folks" as a privi-leged racial-cultural groupbut their whiteness was not about skin color alone.

A feature that Guatemala shares with other Latin American countries(including Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia) is that racialized nation-build-


ing projects (concerned with the assimilation of "indigenous populations")officially silenced both blackness and whiteness. The silencing process wasdisparate as it implied the creation of whiteness (and its placement as the supe-rior racial norm) and the eviction of blackness (considered the most inferiorracial group) from national images. In Peru, the imagined eviction of "blacks"(slave descendants) was facilitated by the role that geography and environ-mental determinism played in racial thought. Defined as Africans (not Ameri-cans) and thus allegedly alien to the climate and (via environmental determin-ism) to the culture of the nation, "blacks" could become Peruvians byassimilating through wage labor in coastal haciendas and the surroundingvillages. This milieu would supposedly most aptly absorb the former slaves'warm-weather culture, music, and cuisine. Whiteness, on the other hand, wascreated with the help of the liberal language of decenda that blended the pre-viously differentiated espanol and criollo into a unified Peruvian upper- andmiddle-class identity. This category continued the colonial sense of calidadwith allusions to gente decentes alleged proper moral, and indeed, disregardingtheir (skin-deep) color when necessary. This historical legacy has made of"whiteness" one of the most analytically complex, literally obscure, and po-litically touchy issues in Latin American racial formations, as it hits a sensitivenerve in the elite's power system.

Unlike Fanon's experience of his own blackness8a clear cut "skincolor" fact that was not altered by class, education, or manners, the experi-ence of, for example my own whiteness (in spite of my brown skin) in LatinAmerica is not straight forward. On the contrary, it requires recognition thatin cases like mine (middle class and educated) brown skin denies and does notdeny my whiteness. This contradiction is at the heart of the Peruvian forma-tion of whiteness, and is the source of its joys and sorrows. My brownskinned signals my non-EuroAmerican originsand therefore denies mywhiteness; yet it does not, by itself, indicate stigmatized (class, geographic, ormoral) origins. Moreover, accompanied by elite education and "proper birth"brown skin does not deny national forms of dim whiteness, those that (un-like Christa's clear whiteness) are not questioned locally. The contradiction thatarticulates Peruvian whiteness transpires, I would argue, because of the con-vergence in skin color of intertwined colonial and modern criteria of distinc-tion, both of them equally prevalent. Silencing whiteness, and replacing it witha profusion of references to decencxi (that include brown-skinned whites likeme) represents a socially produced historical response that skirts the contra-diction, while at the same time maintaining it. Keeping the contradiction withinanalytical scope has been essential to my understanding that modern and co-lonial markers of difference (such as skin-deep color, place of origin, in-come, occupation, language, education, or religious background) historically


infiltrate each other to constitute the variable, yet interdependent, genderedand classed discourses of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Neither "white-ness" nor "blood" are biological traits only. Even when they respond tomodern racial orders, they are tinted by religion, moral, and status. With theconsolidation of racial thought, colonial markers of status conspicuously lin-gered. Along with ideologies of liberal capitalism, they converged in a struc-ture of hierarchical feelings that has shaped social formations where markersof difference have meanings that are not necessarilyor completelypre-determined, but rather depend on the junctural constellation of forces thatshape specific social relations. Thus brown skin does not have meaning in andof itself; it can occasionally be an attribute of a white person, depending(alas!) of whose body it wraps up.

These are some of the complexities that Christa little-Siebold faced dur-ing her fieldwork in Quezaltepeque. As she carefully explains for the case ofGuatemala, in Latin American, modern classifications are intricate hybrids ofindigenous and Western, old and new, orders of differences, their languagesand meanings. Thus, people's appearance," she writes, is the result of a mul-tiplicity of factorsof which phenotype is only one. Hence, the author'shesitation to define a label on one single ground, be it race, ethnicity, or class.Muhto, ladino, indigenous, zambo, or w/iite(and by the same token any other labeDexpress a variety of social conditions that cannot be reduced to modernnotions because they exceed them. Articulating social relations in Quezaltepeque,these labels interrupt the modern, official "Indian-Ladino" (or Indian-Mes-tizo) dichotomy integral to Latin American assimilationist nation-buildingprojects. The dichotomy fixed otherwise mercurial identities, and thus pro-vided a stable ground for the recording of statistics regarding education,urbanization, and sexual morality (statistically measured by the number ofmarriages and children born out of wedlock). Yet, as Christa Little-Sieboldillustrates for Guatemala, in most cases the dichotomy did not erase otherlabelswhich interfere with the homogenizing function that the central stateassigned to the "Indian-Ladino" couple, and alter their dominant meaning,without erasing the dichotomy, and even incorporating some of its evolu-tionary impetus. (Such are the works of hegemony!!) Thus Ladinos can bewhite and therefore "pure blooded"but some of them are also Indianalthough "Indian" is a category that many Quezaltepecos find objectionable,and replace (or skirt) it with the label of "naairales." The resignification ofofficial labels, and particularly the tendency to reject Indianness as a self-as-cribed identity, resonates with the case of Peru where disagreement about themeanings of mestizo persists. While middle- and upper-class individuals cur-rently use the label to disdainfully identify allegedly uneducated "chcte'Tworking-class Spanish-speaking individuals), some indigenous groups disrupt the di-


chotomy by self-labeling as mestizos, without however giving up their claimsto Andean culture. To them although mestizaje does not replace being indig-enous, it does reflect their education and economic achievement, which doesdistinguish them from Indians whom they, in turn, consider uncouth andignorant.

The heteroglossia of labels suggested in Christa Little-Siebold's articleechoes Goldberg's idea that "in the shift from imposition to self-interpreta-tion, received terms are rarely if ever entirely synonymous of self-assumedones."(Goldberg 1993:9) Our next challenge should be to explore theheteroglossia of meaning historically and in connection with the fluidity ofidentities that seems to recur in the Andes and in Guatemala (even if differ-ently). Moving away from the modern notion of identity as individual andexclusive, let's approach ethnographically the mercurial identities and let theirfluidity inform us about the notion of identity itself. Understanding the cur-rent complexity of identities requires inspecting non-modern (Western andnon-Western) modes of identification and their articulation with modem ways,and therefore their silencing and subordination, but by no means obliteration.The interpretation of complex identification processes may benefit fromconceptual and ethnographic investigation situated, like these four articles, atthe crossroads between anthropologies that incorporate temporary dimen-sions of process and power, and histories that seek to include dimensions ofculture and meaning.

Notes

1. Benjamin (1968:255), Marx (1978:595), Roseberry (1991:43).2. Eloquently entitled "Are there Histories of People Without Europe?"

Talal Asad's (1987) early review of Wolf s immense anthropological worldhistory promptly reminded us that local histories do not start with their incor-poration into capitalism.

3. This is not exclusive of North American academia. In an importanteffort to bring a sense of culture into Andean historiography, Alberto FloresGalindo (1986), one of the most an eminent Peruvian historians, resorted toa combination of French and British structuralist theories of myth to pro-pose the endurance of what he denominated Utopia Incaica. From my view-point, only his unmatchable talent as a historian prevented him from reifying"Andean culture," as has been the case with other similar attempts. (See, forexample, Burga 1988; Wachtel 1977)

4. For an excellent analysis of how power becomes culturally visible seeWiener 1995.


5. Fox (1989) for example.6. like some articles in Joseph and Nugent (1994).7. Throughout his article, Todd Little-Siebold qualifies the colonial order

as 'ethnic," or socio-racial. From my viewpoint, this limits his analysis. As herightly remarks colonial labels were abundant, and from my perspective irre-ducible to any modern order, ethnic, racial, or other. Calidadas he alsopoints outreferred to status, and this was a result of occupation, religion,gender, income, or education. Caste was not a marker in and of itself as toindicate someone's social standing it could combine with close, which in turnwas similar to calidad, yet mostly used to refer to individuals of "low" origin.Neither can be translated as ethnicity or race, without losing its historicallyspecific meaning (regarding the Andes, see OToole 2001; Graubart 2001).

8. Fanon 1967.9.About decenda see de la Cadena 2000.

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Marisol de La Cadeña_Comments Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State

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