University of British Columbia

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Associate Professor

About

  I am currently working on several research projects guided by a common interest: to explore how power, affect, and contestation are imbricated in the spatial terrains that make them possible. My ethnographic research has been centered in different areas of the Gran Chaco and the eastern slopes of the Andes in northern Argentina, where I have drawn on the spatial and political texture of these geographies, and the people producing them, to think conceptually about the relationship between critical theory, space, politics, and ethnography.

I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled "The Afterlife of Things: Ruins and the Destruction of Space" (forthcoming with Duke University Press), which draws on fieldwork conducted at the eastern foot of the Andes between 2003 and 2007. The book is a conceptual, ethnographic, and historical meditation on the destruction of space, the sedimentation of historical processes of confrontation in the physical texture of landscapes, and the ways in which people evoke the past, and act upon the present, by drawing upon spatial traces from prior eras. Aiming to rethink the concept of “ruins” as a nodal trope of modernity by grounding places and objects in ruins amid wider, living geographies, the narrative examines the palimpsest of debris produced by colonial violence, missionization, and capitalist and state expansion during the conquest of the Gran Chaco, the vast lowlands east of the Andes that until the late 1800s were beyond the control of the state. Inspired by authors such as Lefebvre, Adorno, Benjamin, Spinoza, and Deleuze, I argue that ruins and debris can be conceptualized as generative spaces and objects: ruptured spaces haunted by absent actors that are also affirmative spatial presences that affect the living and therefore have, as Benjamin would put it, an afterlife.

Since 2003, I am also analyzing several Guaraní land claims in the sugar-producing region of northwest Argentina with the aim of examining the fractured spatial dimensions of a diasporic, urban indigeneity created by the legacy of a transnational labor migration from southeast Bolivia a century ago. In particular, I am looking at the reterritorializations that Guaraní protests and demands for lands of their own are creating in the regional space, amid accusations by officials that those demands are illegitimate because the Guaraní are not "Argentinean indigenous people."

On my blog Space and Politics (http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com), I examine (in English and Spanish) conceptual questions about space, affect, and violence in relation to contemporary political events such as the Egyptian Revolution, the English riots, the kirchnerista government in Argentina, and the Occupy movement. My interest in the intensified affects generated on the streets by multitudes of bodies affecting each other in their confrontation with the state has led me to explore the concept of "resonance" as the material-affective force that guides, and gives power to, the event of insurrections. Drawing on Spinoza, Badiou, as well as theorists of space, I seek to further expand and elaborate my blog essays on resonance in a future manuscript entitled "Resonance and Revolution."

Some of the essays on my blog have also begun exploring the concept of "the terrain" as the lens through which to articulate an immanent theory of space based on its three-dimensional material forms, as they are imbricated in, and transformed by, mobility, speed, state territoriality, and anti-state insurgencies. Combining the work of authors such as Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, Virilio, and Weizman, my aim is to write a book, "The Terrain," examining these ideas in more detail and as they apply to very different types of terrains from all over the world.

Other topics I have published about in the past are the spatiality of social memory, place-making, hegemony, ethnicity, borders and transnationality, political mobilizations, commodity fetishism, ID-paper fetishism, shamanism, and in general the production of subjectivities through experiences of alienation, domination, and contestation. I have analyzed these themes drawing on my ethnographic experience among Toba people of the Gran Chaco on the Pilcomayo River.

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