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In Conversation withMarit Melhuus andBenedicte Bull About Lifeand Death in Mexico.House of Literature,September 26, 2013Claudio Lomnitz

Email [email protected]

Claudio W. Lomnitzis Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology in the

Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, USA.

He works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America,

and particularly of Mexico. Lomnitz received his Ph.D. from

Stanford in 1987. His first book, Evolución de una sociedad

rural (1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in

Tepoztlán, Mexico. After that work, he developed an interest

in conceptualizing the nationstate as a kind of cultural region,

a theme that culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture

and Ideology in Mexican National Space (California, 1992). In

that work, Lomnitz concentrated on the social work of

intellectuals, a theme that he developed in various works on

the history of public culture in Mexico, including Modernidad

Indiana (1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An

Anthropology of Nationalism (2001). In the mid 1990s,

Lomnitz began working on the historical anthropology of

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crisis and published Death and The Idea of Mexico (2005), a

political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the

sixteenth century to the twentyfirst centuries. His most recent

book The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (2014) is

about exile, ideology and revolution, and won the Latin

American Studies Association’s prize for the best book in the

humanities. Lomnitz has also been on the editorial collective

of the postcolonial journal Public Culture, where he served as

editor from 2004–2010. Claudio Lomnitz writes a biweekly

column in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. And he

has written two plays with his brother Alberto Lomnitz,

including a historical play on intellectuals and power that won

Mexico’s National Drama Award in 2010.

Columbia University, New York, USA

AbstractThe abstract is published online only. If you did not include

a short abstract for the online version when you submitted

the manuscript, the first paragraph or the first 10 lines of the

chapter will be displayed here. If possible, please provide us

with an informative abstract.

In this conversation between Prof. MaritMelhuus and Prof. Benedicte Bull (University ofOslo), Columbia University professor ClaudioLomnitz reflects on his longstanding work on‘life and death’ in his native Mexico. Lomnitzoffers his views on the vexed relationshipbetween history and anthropology, on his role asa wellknown public intellectual in Mexico, onMexican intellectual traditions and Mexicannationalism.

Due to temporary illness, Sindre Bangstad wasreplaced by the political scientist Benedicte Bull

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for this particular event in the series. Bangstad has,however, overseen the reworking of the transcript,and is therefore included as a coauthor.

Marit:It is a great pleasure to have you here, Claudio. Inwhat follows, I will try to address some generalissues, and we will also go into some particulars. Ithought I should start precisely with yourpositioning in anthropology and history. A goodworking relationship between these disciplines hasnot always been an obvious one, or an untroubledone for that matter. In 1950, Professor E.E. EvansPritchard, a wellknown British anthropologist,gave a lecture at Oxford on anthropology andhistory where he forcefully argues for theconjoining of these two disciplines. He draws onvery noted anthropologists, such as Claude LéviStrauss and Louis Dumont to make his points. Heaccepts Maitland’s dictum that “anthropology mustchoose between being history and being nothing …though only if it can also be reversed, history mustchoose between being social anthropology or beingnothing”. I am not sure whether historians oranthropologists would frame the issues so boldlytoday, but then the context for our disciplinarydiscussions is also very different. There are fewtoday who would argue that we, theanthropologists, should emulate the naturalsciences—the practitioners of which EvansPritchard was engaging with in his lecture. In fact,I am not quite sure how the relationship betweenanthropology and history is framed today, andwhether it is contentious at all—I think there mightbe more pressing issues than these disciplinaryboundaries. Still, granted your interest in historyand anthropology, my first question has to do withhow you actually view this relationship at a more

general level. Because as Benedicte Bull noted, you

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general level. Because as Benedicte Bull noted, youwere trained as an anthropologist, at StanfordUniversity, but the perspective in very many ofyour publications is historical. So what brought youclose to history, and how do these two perspectives—the historical and the anthropological—merge?What I am asking you is to share your reflectionson these issues, whether they have to do withethnography, field work, the archives, ordocuments.

AQ1AQ2AQ3

Claudio:Sure. I’ll try not to draw this out too long, becausethis is a big topic. I think in my case, one of thethings that my trajectory through Mexico into theUS and by way of France for a little while hasafforded me is the opportunity of being a dilettante,which is something that I have embraced, andtreasured, and tried to claim. If you think aboutLatin America’s intellectual traditions, the essayhas always been touted as the probablyquintessential for, and the peak of, Latin Americanaccomplishment in the intellectual field. And Ithink the essay is essentially the intellectual formthat involves this kind of… well, the negative wayof putting it would be lack of professionalism. Thepositive way of putting it would be that the essayresponds to the actual need to move acrossdisciplinary formations, in part because the life ofthe city, the life of politics, takes precedence overthe life of the academic disciplines. I think I stillwas able to benefit from that aspect of LatinAmerica’s tradition. Today, it is questionable howvibrant that tradition is, but I believe that it is anidentifiable tradition, and a space that one can

claim. So if you look at it biographically, my first



claim. So if you look at it biographically, my firstjob in Mexico was in a department of anthropology,my second job was in a sociology department.Then I came to the US to an anthropologydepartment, whereupon I was hired by a historydepartment at the University of Chicago. So myability to converse across disciplines was in partenvironmentally shaped, and not so muchepistemologically driven, I would say. And in thatsense, I don’t feel competent to do an EvansPritchard “number” on history and anthropology,because I came to bring those fields together out ofcontextual necessity rather than as the result of aninternallydriven disciplinary conviction. On theother hand, it is certainly true that if I wasappointed to the University of Chicago’s HistoryDepartment, it was because my work was already‘historical’ enough to be taken seriously byhistorians. That did not mean, however, that it washistorical enough to be confused with the work of ahistorian. That is a different proposition. It washistorical enough to be able to engage historians,that is all. And when I moved to Chicago andbegan working with historians, I discovered thathistory was a much more different field fromanthropology than I had thought. I had always beenraised with the notion that in the end, it was sort ofthe same. From the start, when I studiedanthropology in Mexico City, I was somewhat inbetween anthropology and history. But when Iactually started working with and traininghistorians, I learned that basically, historiansworked with little pieces of paper. That really iswhat they work with, and what I work with too,now. Basically it is just little bits of paper. That isvery difficult for an anthropologist to assimilate. Ittook me a very long time to realise that. Which is

an obvious thing. Probably someone could have



an obvious thing. Probably someone could havetold me that. But nobody did, and all of a sudden Iwas there and I started realising how differentethnography is from historical work. Ethnographyis a great thing. I mean, ethnography is great forhistorians if they open themselves to that, most ofthem don’t, because ethnography is a form ofembodied practice. That is, you have to putyourself physically in the position of generatinginformation. You are aware, in a very radical way,of what “data” is. You become keenly aware thatall information in social sciences is generated insocial interaction. It is not already there. I thinkthat that is an important matter for any socialscience, for any humanities, and for history as well,and it helps you read documents in a radicallydifferent way.

Marit:I would assume that being having been trained asan anthropologist you would read those documentsand convert them into ethnography, in a sense.

Claudio:Yes, I do think so. I think reading is genuinelydifferent if you have done ethnography than if youhaven’t. So it is a great plus if historians openthemselves to that. This is a generalisation, butthere is a tendency for anthropologists to readdifferently than historians, even books.Anthropologists tend to have what I would call autopian reading of books. That is, they read themas if they were written for them, at any time. Saythat you’re an anthropologist, and you are readingsome book by, say, Karl Marx, in 1853 orsomething like that, and you’re reading it as if itwas written today, for you. I would call this autopian reading of a book, or to be more precise, ananachronistic reading. But also utopian, because it

means pushing the book to tell you something, no



means pushing the book to tell you something, nomatter where it was written, who it was written by,or when. An historian tends to read a book bylocating it historically. Which means that the firstthing they ask is who wrote it, when and for whomwas it written, in what context was it written. Whatwas written before it, what was written after it,what was meant by this and that word when it waswritten. So historians’ reading is, I think, muchmore cautious, and often more precise in terms ofthe reconstruction of the significance of the book.But it also tends to put a bigger ironic distancetowards the work, which can also be negative, Iwould say.

Marit:I would like to go a bit further down the path ofhistory and anthropology. In an article entitled‘Narrating the neoliberal moment’ (Lomnitz2008), which came out in 2008, you draw a linebetween the use of history and working historically.And one of the things that struck me in this articlewas precisely the significance of history forMexico and Mexicans, that is, the native points ofview. History has a particular significance—youhave already touched a bit on that, Claudio. Andyou state something to the effect that history has aspecial significance for what you call ‘dependentcountries’, and ‘frustrated modern projects’. Howwould you say that Mexico, or rather Mexicans,have a particular relationship to its history, andwhat does that imply for anthropologicalscholarship? Are there comparative projects on therole of history in other Latin American countries? Iam thinking here of Marisol de la Cadena’s workon Indigenous Mestizos (Cadena 2000), which ishistorically framed. Is there something particularhere to Mexico? And then I would like to add the

last part of the question, because I would like you



last part of the question, because I would like youto turn the perspective around: How would youplace the role of anthropology on the nationalscene? Is it similar to that of history? BecauseMexico, as many of you would know, has a verylong and widely recognised anthropologicaltradition, and I am wondering whether itcontributes to the same kind of debate, as historydoes. Does it have the same kind of “neuroticobsession”, to quote you on one of your adjectivesfor history, or has anthropology lost its intellectualhold? I am thinking here of people like GuillermoBonfil, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Guillermo De LaPeña, Roger Bartra, Lourdes Arizpe and ArturoWarman. These were all public intellectuals whileworking as anthropologists. What is their role now?

AQ4

Claudio:To the first part: One of the things that I wasthinking about when I was writing that essay was afamous article by Nicholas Dirks several years ago,which was called ‘History as a sign of the modern’(Dirks 1990). When I started writing this, I wasthinking that an excess of history is a sign of afrustrated modern. That is, what you see in acountry like Mexico is a saturation of historicaldiscussion. One interesting thing is that you cantrace that back to the nineteenth century, and Ithink that it has very much to do with, speaking ofdeath in Mexico, it has to do with the fact thatMexico was one of the first nations, one of theearly “national” republics on the world scene. Therepublic is from 1821, but it suffered collectivelysomething like a “near death experience”. Mexicowas first invaded by Spain in 1829—that was afailed invasion—but then it lost half its territory inthe war with the United States in 1846–1848.

During that period, when you read the newspapers,



During that period, when you read the newspapers,there is a lot of sentiment that Mexico might notsurvive as a country. For example Lucas Alamán,one of the great historians and statesmen in Mexicoin the midnineteenth century, writes one of thefirst histories of Mexican independence, publishedin 1849, the year right after Mexico lost the warwith the United State, a big multivolume work. Inhis foreword, Alamán says that he is not sure whohe is writing this book for, as he is not certainwhether Mexico will actually survive. If it doesn’t,then Alamán hoped that at least the history wouldbe instructive to the other Spanish Americannations. Mexico was invaded again in 1862, by theFrench up until 1867. And it is not until the defeatof the French, which at the time was referred to as“the second independence”, that the boundaries ofMexico were felt to be more or less secure. It wasnot until then that Mexico felt that it had survivedas a nation. I believe that this extended uncertaintygenerated a very intense historical obsession. Idon’t think that Mexico is a unique case in thisregard, but it is an important instance of historicalselfobsession, in the sense that countries that hadtheir survival at issue, tend to generate a lot ofhistorical discourse. That is certainly also thePeruvian and Bolivian case, that you mentioned. Soyou have a huge amount of historical excess. Thishas been commented even in the nineteenth centuryby American travellers. Hubert Bancroft, who wenton to create the collection that later became theBancroft Library, a very important holding at theUniversity of California, went to Mexico in the1880s, and he comments on the amount ofhistorical writing and publishing in Mexico as waysuperior to what there was in the US. And therewas also the intensity of the historical debate. He

describes a rock fight between liberals and



describes a rock fight between liberals andconservatives over which was the appropriate dayto celebrate national independence, in the city ofSan Luis Potosí. Because the conservatives wantedto celebrate the date that General Agustín deIturbide won independence, and the liberals the daythat Miguel Hidalgo declared independence. Thisrock fight took place in 1883, 60 years afterindependence. So because the politicization ofhistory generated something of what LeviStrausstalked about with regard to mythology: That is,history becomes a sort of key or register in whichyou can mark any kind of distinction, because it isa known language that has its imagery and canserve allegorical functions. So much of the historyis not really academic history at all, it is iconic,somewhat in the ways of the Catholic church’sdepiction of the lives of the saints. Because of this,professional historians have an edge on publicdiscussion, as they can always frame what ishappening in relation to these icons, allegories andmyths. And when I say “they”, I mean “we”,because I actually do this sort of work as well; Iwrite in a newspaper, and I constantly indulge inthat faculty, very often abusively. You say “so youwant to talk about this”, and then woom!, youthrow in a little historical spin which helps you putit in a certain context of dialogue. That historicalspin moves current events into a dialogue withhistorical myths as well as with historical facts. Sohistorians have had a very important role in publicdiscussion, very often more than they, or we,deserve, in my opinion.Anthropologists in public have a different story. InMexico, they have had a tremendous public role,due to their role in the Mexican revolution, wherethey actually figured the collective image of the

whole postrevolutionary era. That image was

2



whole postrevolutionary era. That image wascreated by anthropologists. Specifically I wouldsay that Manuel Gamio was the guiding figure. Hewas a student of the pioneer ethnographer FranzBoas, but not a very good student. I think he was agreat figure, but more of a trickster than a dustyacademic. Gamio used Boas for what he wanted to,rather than being a deep or rigorous follower.Gamio worked in Teotihuacan, the famouspyramids that are right outside of Mexico City inthe late 1910s and early 1920s, and at the time hewas an officer in the revolutionary government; hewas an undersecretary of agriculture. As anarchaeologist and anthropologist he also distributedland, he had an educational project there, and thewhole project had as its guiding figure and symbolthe pyramid, the great pyramids of Teotihuacan.The grandeur of the past—represented by thepyramids—was made to stand also for the potentialof Mexico’s future. While the village that sat belowthe pyramids, San Juán Teotihuacan, whereGamio’s team did field work, stood for thedegradation of colonial, and, let’s say, neocolonial,prerevolutionary exploitation. So the role ofanthropology was to bring that village back up,let’s say, to the level of the potential that wasmaterially visible in the pyramid. That formulation,I think, was huge in Mexico, and I think thatpetered out during the era of neoliberal reformsthat started in the early 1980s. So the period ofneoliberal reform really eviscerated the role thatanthropology had had, which means that recentlythere are fewer voices that have come fromanthropology in the public. I mean, of the peoplethat you mentioned, there is only Roger Bartratoday. The rest are either dead or no longerparticipate actively in public debate. Before you

really had major figures that were major public

3



really had major figures that were major publicvoices—Alfonso Caso, Aguirre Beltrán, ArturoWarman, Guillermo Bonfil, and others—several ofthem also with important political positions. Thatreally collapsed in the 1980s. And I don’t think ithas been rebuilt yet.

Marit:I think this is the time to turn to death. You havefocused on so many different issues—nationalism,political cultures, corruption, modernity,intellectuals, the staging of Mexico by elites, andthen death. And the way I’ve read your Death AndThe Idea of Mexico (Lomnitz 2005) it’s anhistorical book, but it is written with a lot ofanthropological analysis, I would say, in the wayyou treat much of your data. It draws us throughMexican history from the conquest and down tothis day, so it’s a long history of death. There aremany subtexts, but the major focus is therelationship between death and death imagery,death practices, notions of the afterlife—and theformation of the modern nation state. It brings tomind other books on death, like KatherineVerdery’s The Political Life of Dead Bodies(Verdery 2000) and Heonik Kwon’s After theMassacre (Kwon 2006), but the scale of yourproject is much broader. So I’m wondering: Whatdrew your attention to death? What makes death inMexico so compelling that you need five hundredpages to elaborate on this central biopoliticaltopic?

AQ5

Claudio:The five hundred pages definitely have to do withdecline, right? [laughter] When you’re young youhave the mental power to say something verybriefly, but as you get older it becomes harder and

harder to rein oneself in. So it’s not a sign of



harder to rein oneself in. So it’s not a sign ofaccomplishment, but rather one of difficulty ofsynthesis. Again, I will do a little biographicalanswer, but also a more conceptual one. When Iwas doing my doctoral work, I spent a year inParis, and I was in Philippe Aries’ seminar at atime when he was publishing his big book on thehistory of death in the West. So I started thinkingabout the possibility of writing a dissertation aboutthis, but I soon became discouraged with it. I feltthat I couldn’t really break out of Aries’ text, that itwas a wonderful work and that to write a bookabout death in Mexico would only be to reproduceAries’ thing in Mexico and say something like “andit happened here, too”. That’s fine, but I didn’twant to do it. So I abandoned the topic, but I hadworked on it enough to know something about thesubject. And I think that is important, because whathappens with death in the case of Mexico, is that inthe twentieth century, death imagery becameworked on in certain nationalist traditions, and inparticular during the formation of Mexicanmodernism, of modern art. Diego Rivera isespecially important in this regard, but not onlyhim. Mexican modern art in the 1920s takes as itssource of inspiration two currents: One is preColumbian sculpture, which in the case of Mexicoincludes very prominently Aztec sculpture, and ifyou are familiar with this kind of sculpture, youwould know that there is a lot of death imagery init, a lot of sculls and skeletons. And then thesecond source was a popular newspaperman andengraver, called José Guadalupe Posada, who diedin 1913, and who has been compared to Goya. Hedid something like 30,000 engravings for theMexican penny press, the working class press inMexico City. So Diego Rivera, for example, is

trying to blend two sources—one of which is a

4



trying to blend two sources—one of which is apopular working man’s press, and the other is preColumbian sculpture—to forge a modern Mexicanart. Posada’s main thing was these dressedupskeletons. You have seen Posada, I am sure, even ifyou don’t know the images’ author, you have allsurely seen Posada engravings. The images use thenewspaper as an ironic space, to comment on dailylife from the vantage point of death. Posadasdrawings are all skeletons, and they are all dressedup so that their social identities, and vanities, areplain. So both sources for the formation of Mexicanmodernism, which is a key to nationalism in thetwentieth century, have death imagery at theircentre. And as a result, there is a lot of ‘death talk’in twentieth century Mexican nationalism. That iswhy, knowing something bigger and broader aboutthe history of death, I think it was important for meto identify this as an interesting problem, since youhave a peculiar tendency to nationalize death and touse death imagery in the fabrication of Mexico’snational brand of modernism. It is very hard toidentify an interesting problem regarding theanthropology of death, because death is a classicaltheme. What drew me to writing the book wasseeing a series of cartoons and drawings made inthe 1980s, during the neoliberal crisis in Mexico.There was an economic crisis in 1982, when theprice of oil dropped and the government couldn’tmeet its debt obligations, and as a result, the turn toneoliberalism in Mexico was very drastic. Itstarted with the bankruptcy of the government. Soduring this crisis, I started seeing cartoonists usedeath imagery in a way that was somewhatdifferent and dissonant from earlier usage. Thatstarted getting me attuned to the plasticity of deathimagery, to its political dimension. So my book as

a whole is a political history of death in Mexico. Its



a whole is a political history of death in Mexico. Itsbasic idea—and now I’m moving from thebiographical to the conceptual—is that most of thehistoriography about death, and a lot of theanthropology about death, is really focused on themourners, the bereaved, and the problem ofbereavement. But if you look at death morebroadly, in a tradition that is more out of GeorgeBataille, in a greater economy than that of thebereaved, it brings into focus a political field thatincludes not only the bereaved and the mourners,but also friends, enemies, and people who areindifferent to the departed. All of that factors in.And it gives you a figure of death which is at thesame time a set of social practices: a representationand a set of social practices that can allow you toarticulate a political history of Mexico. So this islong book because it is a very pretentious book. Imean, it is.

AQ6

Marit:Let me just add one question to that, and then I’llleave the word to Benedicte. Very often when wedo anthropology and are out in the field—whateverit is we are looking at—serendipity is a word thatinevitably crops up. I mean, you run into thingsthat you didn’t think you were going to run into,and that actually turn out to be very, very importantfor the way in which your ethnography is released,if you could put it that way. Did you stumble acrossany such phenomena? In particular, I have alwayswanted to ask you: How did Purgatory show up? Ordid you already know that you were going to writeso much about it? Because you have somewonderful discussions around the meanings ofPurgatory for one’s ties to the priest, to property, et

cetera. Would you consider Purgatory a



cetera. Would you consider Purgatory aphenomenon you stumbled upon?

Claudio:Well, yes. Yes, I did. Or: Yes and no. The ‘yes’ partis that initially my idea for writing this book was tostart in the 1920s, which is when a certain kind ofdeath imagery starts getting adopted as part of anationalist discourse. Which is a very bizarre thing,and unusual. It is comparable in some way, I wouldsay, to the nationalisation of sex in Brazil throughthe carnival. Death and sex are connected, deeplyconnected, but it is interesting that Mexico took updeath as its national form, it is verycounterintuitive, and one of the problems I wantedto explain. And my plan was just to do thistwentieth century history of the political use ofdeath and rely on the secondary literature for all thebackground. So I started looking at the secondaryliterature, and it started collapsing under my gaze. Ithought it could sustain whatever history I wrotefor the twentieth century, but it couldn’t. Thenineteenth century material that is in my book wasa total discovery, the secondary literature on thesubject a complete mess, and the primary materialsthat I was finding were completely different fromanything I would have expected, and very differentfrom what happened other places. Similarprocesses might be found in some Latin Americancountries, not all of them, but some. Usually, deathin the nineteenth century is represented in thebroad history of the modern as the era of the denialof death. In the late eighteenth century and thewhole nineteenth century, the dead are taken out ofthe churches and put into cemeteries outside of thecities. There is the whole urban sanitationmovements, ideas about contagion and publichealth, all these ideas and movements that push

death out, and so you have the horror of death



death out, and so you have the horror of deathwhich is the typical story of the modernisation ofdeathways in Europe, and all over the world. Butwhat is interesting when you look at the history ofMexico, is that the political fractiousness of thenineteenth century made that debate about what todo with the dead a point of contention whichsaturated the public sphere. For example—and thiswas a great surprise to me—the celebration of theDays of the Dead; this is on the 1st and 2nd ofNovember, the All Saints’ Days and the All Souls’Day, a feast that has very much to do withPurgatory. The All Souls’ Day is for the souls inPurgatory, while the All Saints’ Day is for the soulswho are already in Glory. The notion is that theones who are already in heaven, the Saints, are theexample for all of us, the people whom we rejoicein, and then the next ones that we celebrate onNovember 2nd are our dead family members, whoare perhaps still in Purgatory, but on their way toheaven. That is, not my family, because I amJewish, so they would never have gotten even asfar as Purgatory. I’m not joking. And probably, ifmany of you are Lutherans or Protestants, justforget it, you would not have been included either.But within Catholicism, the saints were in heaven,while the souls who died with sins that still neededto be expurgated were in Purgatory, so on AllSouls’ Day you are praying for them, and doingthings that will help move them from Purgatoryinto heaven. That is the meaning of the Days of theDead, which were instated during The Middle Agesby the Church as an official holiday. So what Ifound was that in the late eighteenth century, theDays of the Dead were celebrated over the courseof a week, right up until the 2nd of November,while by the 1870s the celebration in Mexico lasted

for as long as 6 weeks. It started a couple of weeks



for as long as 6 weeks. It started a couple of weeksbefore the Days of the Dead proper, and went on allthe way through to the day of the Virgin ofGuadalupe on December 12th. That is, the holidaystarted late October, and continued through thewhole of November, and early December. This ranagainst the whole idea of the denial of death in thenineteenth century. So I had to start rethinking theproblem of Purgatory, from just looking at thisnineteenth century data, and that forced me to gofurther back to discover—and this is one of thediscoveries of the book—that the Days of the Deadwere successfully implemented in Mexico, and Iwould say in the Americas but certainly in Mexico,before the doctrine of Purgatory was successfullyconveyed to the indigenous people. So you have atension around the celebration of the dead as acommunal affair, and the problem of property,family structure et cetera that is dictated byPurgatory and its connection to testaments andinheritance. So this becomes a central idea andfinding of the book. But as you say, there isserendipity in the case, because what lead me therewas the discovery that the Days of the Dead in1867, for example, lasted more than 6 weeks, whenin the late eighteenth century they lasted a week.This ran completely against what anybody hadsaid.

Marit:So, Benedicte, would you like to shift track, maybefrom death to life?

Benedicte:Yes, I would like to shift track, but before that letme add just a little question on this topic.Unfortunately, I have not read your Death And TheIdea Of Mexico, but I am curious of your thoughtsabout how this culture and these traditions affect or

help people deal with the extreme presence of



help people deal with the extreme presence ofdeath in certain areas in Mexico in the present. Iam thinking of the areas most affected by the drugwars, both through the media and through theirdaily experiences. Do you have any thoughts onthat?

Claudio:I have some thoughts, but I haven’t done a study onit. This book was published finished in 2005, andthe drug war started in 2006, so this massive killingthat you’ve seen started after I finished the book.I’ve thought about it just because I can’t avoidthinking about it, that’ all. One thing is that neitherin the period prior or for this period does thistradition of, let’s say, verbal familiarity andplayfulness with death and with the dead make therelationship with death or with the dead any moreor less horrific. Sometimes when people talk aboutdeath in Mexico, this notion has been in play, but Idon’t agree with it—not before the current drugwar, and not since. We have songs and songwriters,like the famous José Alfredo Jiménez and his song“La vida no vale nada”, ‘Life is not worthanything’. This has generated a lot of commentary.And with writers like Juan Rulfo (1917–1986), themost famous modernist writer in Mexico, theblurred boundary between life and death is one ofthe key things that have been played with in aliterary idiom. Sometimes these themes have beeninterpreted literally, like the title of the JoséAlfredo Jiménez’ song says, that in Mexico life isnot worth anything. I don’t actually think that thatis the only interpretation that one could have, ornot even the best one. So I don’t believe that whathas been happening now is, say, an example of thelack of importance of life or death in Mexico. Idon’t believe that was the case even before, during

the Mexican revolution or any other time of



the Mexican revolution or any other time ofmassive killing. But what you do have is aritualised basis and a somewhat set language tohelp you talk about death and dying that sometimesis helpful. For example what you see in Mexicosince the 1985 earthquake, but even more since thedrug wars, is the beginning of the use of things likethe Days of the Dead as sites for politicalorganisation, for protest around these processes.You do see some of the historically developedcultural artefacts and forms being deployed in thecontemporary moment, often as a form ofcommemoration and protest. Much of what hasbeen happening recently that is really quiteradically new, and this has to be analysed inrelation to issues of globalisation rather than tryingto seek out some kind of ‘ancestral Mexicantradition’. For example, beheading. You have a lotof decapitation in the drug wars in Mexico, and onecould say “you know, there is a long tradition forthis”, such as Miguel Hidalgo, the leader ofMexican independence and some of his merry men.They were decapitated, and their heads were put onspikes outside the the building Alhóndiga deGranaditas in the city of Guanajuato. Their skullsremained there for 10 years, actually, untilindependence was won. So you could argue that“we have a tradition” of beheading. But, as ithappens, I know about Miguel Hidalgo’sdecapitation because I’m an historian, but mostpeople don’t know that. There is no traditionconcerning that fact. Nobody who celebratesMiguel Hidalgo imagines that his head was on astick. The fact that you can find historicalantecedents does not make a contemporary practicethe result of a tradition. Whereas I think you couldshow as an historian that recent decapitations in

Mexico follow the ones that happened with Al



Mexico follow the ones that happened with AlQai’da. I think you can show very clearly that youhave an international, globalised idiom of terrorthat at a certain point enters the drug wars. So thehistorical impulse, and especially when you aredealing with national history, to discuss thecontemporary moment should be done with a lot ofcare. The tendency is always—and certainly inMexico, which is a very nationalist country—to tryto look for an antecedent that is part of a nationaltradition. That’s a mistake whether you are dealingwith the sixteenth century or the twenty firstcentury.

AQ7

Benedicte:Turning to a bit of a different topic now. For anumber of years you were a member of theeditorial collective, and editor of the influentialtransdisciplinary postcolonial journal PublicCulture. But you have also written in theintroduction to Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico(Lomnitz 2001) that in Western academia, theintellectual traditions of Latin America have beenparochialised, that is referred to as ‘nonWestern’,despite the fact that they have as much a claim toEurope as does the United States. And you go on toargue that the corollary of this view is that thecategory of the ‘nonWestern’ is the category of theparticular, and therefore not a suitable place tothink through human universals or events of worldhistorical significance. I just wondered if you couldsay something whether postcolonial theory ishelpful for thinking about Mexico today, and whatimportance this kind of theory has.

Claudio:Well, I have some ambivalence toward that, nottoward postcolonial theory in itself but toward its

deployment. I think that the term ‘postcolonial’



deployment. I think that the term ‘postcolonial’sits very uneasy in Latin America. First, becausethe term has a historical gesture incorporated intoit: the postcolonial is supposed to occur aftersomething else that is called colonial, and as aresult it is a way of naming contemporary historythat weights the colonial as the site from which youare going to refer. I have a lot of problems with thatfor Latin America. That doesn’t mean that postcolonial theory, that is, the kinds of approaches thatwere used to think about, say, India or the MiddleEast, aren’t actually quite fertile to think and toraise questions in Latin America. But the term‘postcolonial’ I really dislike, in part because weare talking about a 200 year history of the ‘postcolonial’ in Latin America. That’s a long time todecide that you are going to use ‘post’ tocharacterise it. At a certain point, one might havethe right to name whatever it is that one is living inpositive terms, right? For example, at a certainpoint the moderns decided to call themselvesmoderns, and not say, ‘postmedievalists’. In this,there is a certain question that has to do with theexistential gesture around how you denominateyour era that I’m uneasy with. That’s one thing.The other thing is that the term ‘colonial’ for LatinAmerica, is putting you in a very different kind ofspace than when you are talking about exBritishand even exFrench colonies. When you go toIndia, for instance… I went for 10 days, and thatwas enough for me to realise—and by the way, Ihave been very close to a lot of Indian people, thatis, not Indian people, but a lot of Indianintellectuals that have been involved in these andwho were very close colleagues of mine at Chicagoand also at Columbia. So I have been involved inthis dialogue, and it’s been very formative for me,

so I’m not saying that we can’t learn anything from



so I’m not saying that we can’t learn anything fromit. I am just talking about the nomenclature andparts of the implications of using the term postcolonial without an interrogation. As I was saying,you go to India, and the first thing you discover,that is, “discover”, if you’re from LatinAmerica, isthat there is a big bunch of religions there that arenonChristian. Which simply don’t exist in LatinAmerica. I mean, even the indigenous peoples, whomight not be considered Christians by priests, use acertain amount of some of the exoskeleton ofChristianity in their rituals. Even when you go toregions in Mexico that are hardly Christianised,they may not be Christians, in the sense that theydo not believe a lot of the stuff that they’resupposed to believe in—but they have Christianstuff that is central to their religious practice. Theyhave a church, they have a cross. If you go to India,you don’t have either nearuniversal adoption ofthe English language, or of the Christian thing. Inother words, the depth of colonisation in LatinAmerica, when you say ‘colonial’, meanssomething else than it means if you go to India. Itreally means something else! It is also a muchearlier project of colonisation, much more akin to,say, Roman colonisation. Whereas when they say‘colonialism’, the British are thinking about lateeighteenth century and nineteenth century Britain,that is, an industrial nation. Colonialism in LatinAmerica is Spain in the seventeenth century, or thesixteenth century, and the model for that is Rome!So, I am very much in favour of dialogue withpostcolonial theory, because I think that I at leasthave learned a lot from talking and thinking aboutLatin American history from those angles. But I amnot favourable to simply mobilising the samenomenclature.



AQ8

Benedicte:You have written two publications on antiSemitism that might stand out a little bit from therest of your production—one on Mexico under thePRI [the Partido Revolucionario Institucional],(Lomnitz 2010) and one on Venezuela underChávez (Lomnitz and Sánchez 2012). I wanted toask you what motivated you to write those books.You have given us a little piece of biographicalinformation now that might give a hint, so maybethe more interesting question is: What is your viewof the position of antiSemitism in Latin Americatoday, in these new leftist governments andbeyond? And what about the respect for liberalvalues—do you have any thoughts on that?

Claudio:First, and this is an answer to what Marit pointedout earlier, I am delighted that these two very shortessays are now considered books! That goes toshow that I have written short things, it’s not alllong!

Benedicte:That’s what Amazon does for you; they all appearas books, and I haven’t read them.

Claudio:Because of the ebook now, they are now books,but they are really thirty page essays. I wouldn’tcall them books, but I’m delighted to do so just forMarit’s sake, to say that not all of what I’ve writtenis six hundred pages long. There are thirty pagebooks of mine that you can read. And you can buythem on Amazon as a book! So they’re books, as aresult. So, basically, the main work that I wrote onthis topic is the piece that I wrote on antiSemitismand the Mexican revolution. A very, veryinteresting thing caught my eye, and it is about the

way in which the Dreyfus affair played out in

5



way in which the Dreyfus affair played out inMexico. But the reason why I wrote it, had to dowith serendipity. I am sure that the fact that I’mJewish helped me notice it. The archvillains of theMexican revolution and of the late Porfiriato are agroup that is known as the Científicos, a group of,let’s say, a technocratic elite that were positivists.They were a coterie around the dictator PorfirioDiaz, and became a main target of criticism stillduring the last 10 years of his dictatorship and inthe revolution. What struck me all of a sudden—and I was working on the Científicos in the play Iwas writing, about Francisco Bulnes, he was one ofthe group—was that I discovered an abundance ofantiSemitic language used in the discussion of theCientifícos. It was a modern antiSemitic discourse,not the old “Christkiller” theme. I am talkingabout nationalist, Dreyfus affairera, antisemiticlanguage, right? Jews as “Financial capitalists whohave no loyalty to the nation”, let’s say. Jews asnationless people, and as traitors to the nation. It isthis nationalist form of antiSemitism whichemerges in late nineteenth century Mexico, and notso much the older, medieval antiSemitism. Whatwas interesting to me about the case, and that is weI wrote extensively about it—the “book” is short,but it is intense—is that none of the Cientifícoswere Jewish. So I started looking into the matter.You know, when you read Jewish history of Mexicoit is said, and I believe this is right, that there wasnot much antiJewish sentiment. Jews were fine,you know, nobody cared that much about them. Sothe few who have written Jewish history in Mexico,like in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury, write about people who left Europe, whichwas a context with very intense antiSemitism, andarrived to Mexico where there wasn’t, and thrived

there. And I don’t think they’re entirely wrong in

6



there. And I don’t think they’re entirely wrong inwriting that. Nonetheless, you have fullyblownantiSemitic rhetoric that is being mobilised againsta group that are not Jewish, but that are occupying,let’s say, ‘the Jewish slot’, which of course is notinconsequential for Jews, because later you canmobilize that rhetoric against actual Jews. Butthat’s not the origin of the discourse, and not theuse of it, in Mexico in this period. Because I havewritten quite a lot about nationalism, this was alittle bit of a discovery for me, to think about thestudy of antiSemitism as a sensitive point forconceptualizing the development of various kindsof nationalist rhetoric. In the case of Venezuela, itis much of the same. I have not worked inVenezuela, I wrote the work that you refer totogether with Rafael Sánchez, an anthropologistwho works in the Netherlands, but who is fromVenezuela. But I know the country a little bitbecause I have family there. And I don’t have at allthe impression that you have very intense, popularantiSemitism. But you did have at a certain pointduring the Chavista mobilization, a set ofunquestionably antiSemitic forays, includingactually going into synagogues and painting themup; breaking objects; things like that. You did havecertain practices targeted against Jews, coded asantiIsrael, that occurred at a certain moment,which was the moment in which we wrote thatessay. I believe that antiSemitism is a legitimateconcern in Latin America. Not usually that much interms of persecution of Jews; sometimes, like inArgentina, where there has been a really big Jewishcommunity, you have had genuine antiSemitism. Iwouldn’t say Jewhatred is not absent; it exists. Butit is not a very prominent issue. AntiSemiticrhetoric, however, is a significant issue for the

question of nationalism. Indeed, one of the

7

8



question of nationalism. Indeed, one of theproblems that is of interest to me about thedevelopment of the left in Latin America today isits complex and to my mind quite problematicconnection to nationalism. So when you see thatkind of antiSemitism emerging within a politicalmovement, it is to my mind—like in Mexico in thelate Porfiriato era in the late nineteenth century—symptomatic of the rise of certain forms ofnationalism, and something that I think it is worthpaying attention to.

AQ9AQ10AQ11AQ12AQ13

Benedicte:I would love for you to elaborate a little bit onwhat you find problematic between the left in LatinAmerica and nationalism. Do you think you coulddo that?

Claudio:Sure. This would be my take just in a nutshell; youare a political scientist and I hope you can arguewith this, accept or reject it. But to my mind, whathas happened there is that you have had, since the1980s and in some cases since the 1970s, a veryintense and very harsh neoliberal transition. Thattransition produced something that has been a lotless talked about, which is what I would call a neoRepublican reaction. A lot of the left, not all of itbut a lot of it, transited to a space that wasoccupied before by Republicanism. Which is whyyou have a renaissance of figures like BenitoJuárez in Mexico. I mean, he was great and allthat, and I don’t mean to poohpooh him. But whenI was studying in Mexico City in the mid1970s,

Benito Juárez was not particularly a hero of the

9



Benito Juárez was not particularly a hero of theleft. He was a national hero, certainly, including ahero of the left, but he was not a hero of the left assuch. He was the Indian president, et cetera, he wasa hero against the French intervention. He was alsothe person who expropriated lands from theChurch, so all that is fine for the left. But he wasalso remembered by the left as the man whoexpropriated indigenous lands from indigenouscommunities, and that wasn’t so great. Juárez was aliberal, that is what he was. He wasn’t hero of theleft; I don’t mean to say that he was an antihero ofthe left, but he wasn’t a hero of the left. Now all ofa sudden you see Andrés Manuel López Obradorholding a speech beneath this gigantic image ofBenito Juárez. You have the transition of a goodchunk of the left into neoRepublican territory.Which means what? It means a new kind offoundationalism, a republican revivalism, meaningenthusiasm for new constitutions, new foundationsof the Republic, refoundations of the Republic;these are all flags of a good chunk of the left. Italso means that corruption becomes the prototypeof the ills of society, right? The old left did notbelieve in this—it was more internationalist, lessenthusiastic with regard to reviving ancientnationalisms. I am not saying that I am of the oldleft—I am not—but this is an empirical fact, theold left did not believe that the problem of theRepublic was the corruption of the citizen. That isa classical Republican belief that you find nowamong the López Obradors and the HugoChávez’es and all the way down the line of LatinAmerican populism. So neoliberalism produces amigration of the left to neoRepublicanism. AndneoRepublicanism includes nationalism as the

heart of its justification. And I think that this is a

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heart of its justification. And I think that this is aproblem.

Notes1. Originally delivered for the 1950 Marett

Lecture at Oxford University, EvansPritchard’s lecture was later developed intoa 1961 monograph entitled Anthropologyand History (EvansPritchard 1961).

2. In his native Mexico, Lomnitz is also knownas a syndicated columnist for the newspaperLa Jornada, and has also previously been acolumnist in El Exelsior.

3. Manuel Gamio (1880–1960), often referredto as the ‘founding father’ of modernanthropology in Mexico, did his Ph.D. underthe supervision of Franz Boas at ColumbiaUniversity.

4. See Aries (1982).

5. The hegemonic state and centrist party ofMexico, the PRI under various names andpolitical guises ruled Mexico for a period of71 years, from 1929 to 2000. It was namedthe PRI in 1946.

6. Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915), the Mexicandictator brought to power in a military coupin 1876, practically ruled Mexico for35 years until the outbreak of the Mexicanrevolution in 1910. This period is generallyknown as the Porfiriato in Mexico.

7. Dr. Rafael Sánchez works at the Universityof Amsterdam in the Netherlands.



8. Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), a militaryofficer turned socialist politician, was theelected president of Venezuela from 1999untill his death in 2013.

9. Juárez (1806–1872), a Mexican lawyer andliberal politician of Zapotec origins from thestate of Oaxaca, served as president ofMexico for five terms from the 1850s to the1870s.

10. López Obrador, originally a PRI politician,was elected Head of Government of theFederal District (Mexico City) as acandidate for the nominally socialdemocratic PRD in 2000, and served inthat post until 2005. In 2006 and 2012,respectively, he was the presidentialcandidate for a leftleaning coalition. Heofficially resigned from the PRD in 2012.

References

Aries, Philippe. 1982. The Hour of Our Death: TheClassic History of Western Attitudes TowardsDeath Over the Last One Thousand Years, trans.Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos:The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru,1919–1991. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dirks, Nicholas B. 1990. History as a Sign of theModern. Public Culture 2 (2): 25–32.

EvansPritchard, E.E. 1961. Anthropology andHistory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.



Kwon, Heun. 2006. After the Massacre:Commemoration and Consolation in Han My andMy Lai. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lomnitz, Claudio. 2001. Deep Mexico, SilentMexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lomnitz, Claudio. 2005. Death and The Idea ofMexico. New York: Zone Books.

Lomnitz, Claudio. 2008. Narrating the NeoliberalMoment: History, Journalism, Historicity. PublicCulture 20 (1) 2008: 39–56.

Lomnitz, Claudio. 2010. AntiSemitism and theIdeology of the Mexican Revolution.Representations 110 (1): 1–28.

Lomnitz, Claudio, and Rafael Sánchez. 2012.Chávez, Jews and The Left. Boston: Boston ReviewBooks.

Verdery, Katherine. 2000. The Political Life ofDead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change.New York: Columbia University Press.

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