The Politics and Performance of Mestizaje in Latin America: Mestizo Acts by Paul K Eiss & Joanne Rapport

Author:Paul K Eiss & Joanne Rapport [Eiss, Paul K & Rapport, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138564336
Google: LY5dswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39230565
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-12T12:32:39+00:00

IV

As the last topic of what I understand to be ‘mestizo-criollo acts’, I would like to reinforce the idea that these social ‘acts’ are not truly local by returning to the notion that they are neither unique nor exceptional. Rather, these acts represent a Eurocentric gaze constructed not only with the philosophical and sociological theories we have seen so far, but also with imaginaries populated by the troublesome images of the wild creatures I mention throughout this paper. These troublesome images may also be considered re-appropriations of a vision that, coming from the European past, defines the ‘other’ and at the same time determines the possibilities for how this ‘other’ might be either redeemed, as in Tamayo’s take on the Indian, or forever socially chastised, as in Arguedas’s pessimistic conceptualization of mestizos and Indians.

Let us consider some of these re-appropriations of the past. The European myths of the redeemed savage belong to a storytelling that has not been sufficiently explored in Latin America. In their transatlantic voyages to Latin American territories, the myths turn into ‘mestizo’ and ‘criollo acts’ rooted in 19th and early 20th-century discussions that present the Indian as a social prototype. In this sense, the Bolivian dispute on how to manage the ‘Indian problem’ may not have been just a local attempt to formulate the social viability of the nation-state, but also the re-enactment of a much wider cultural sensibility fixated on ‘savages’, or wild men that represent the real dangers besieging the well-being of Western societies.

Here, I find it important to make a parenthetical remark on the peculiar mutations that Roger Bartra has found throughout the history of the myth of the wild man. In his book The Artificial Savage (1997), Bartra proposes to seek out the mutations that will allow him to understand the continuing presence of the myth of the wild man throughout the centuries. After examining the ways in which pagan folklore influenced mythical thought, whether in the popular lyrics of the poets of the Reformation or in Spanish Renaissance humanism, Bartra introduces us to a chain of mutations that connects eaters of human flesh with the horrific cannibals painted by Goya and Frankenstein’s monster of Mary Shelley. Through studying these mutations, Bartra contests what Ferdinand Braudel called histoire événementielle, an evolutionary history of ideas that emphasizes the narration of intellectual achievements as major events produced in the course of human history. According to Bartra, this view, impregnated exclusively with the evolution of grandiose events, ignores the malign, aggressive and dangerous facets of the myth of the wild man, without which, Bartra asserts, one cannot comprehend both the extraordinary complexity of myth and its enormous plasticity. Consequently, Bartra proposes a ‘neo-evolutionist’ approach to the history of myths that goes beyond the sequential narration of major events and focuses his attention on certain transitional moments that are symptomatic, both in relation to the composition of the myth and its functions within the surrounding cultural texture (15–18).

Transported to Bolivia, this discussion could be applied to

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