Performing the national territory: The geography of national‐day celebrations

The nation is a relatively abstract imagined community that is visualised through a variety of symbols as well as communicative and performative practices. In this paper, we explore how the national territory, one of the foundations of the nation‐state, is performed on national‐day celebrations and brings the nation into being. Drawing on ethnographic research on national days in Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, we show how the state's internal administrative divisions and ethnic differences are at once made explicit but also subordinated to the nation. Moreover, we show how in such celebrations, potentially disruptive or competing affiliations such as ethnicity and regional loyalties are re‐imagined. Both the rotation of the central celebration and its replication all over the national territory carry the nation into the regions and integrate the regions into the nation‐state. The ‘co‐memoration’ turns participants and spectators from locals into national compatriots and thus not only performs nationality but also performs the relationship among nation, state and citizen, set within a particular territory.     

‘Vienen de gente de mucha discreción y entendimiento:’ ethnic identity,ambivalence, and colonial discourses in Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala

Diego Muñoz Camargo's Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1585) is a well-known reference on the history of Tlaxcala that scholars have studied to better understand Tlaxcalan participation in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, its relationship with the Spanish Crown, and the author's selective approach to local history. Often, these approaches present the historian as acculturated or Hispanized because of his celebration of the Spanish or criticism of local religious practices. This article complicates such approaches in order to show the complex ways that the author approached issues of cultural difference. Examining Muñoz Camargo's recourse to colonial discourses of morality, I argue that the author molds and tailors these discourses to fit local Tlaxcalan circumstances. In doing so, I show how he humanizes Tlaxcala's ruling elite while exemplifying the inherent ambivalence of moral authority in Colonial New Spain.     

Standing at the gates of Europe: Human behavior and biogeography in the Southern Carpathians during the Late Pleistocene

This study presents a behavioral analysis of Middle and Upper Paleolithic lithic assemblages from 14 sites located in the southern Carpathian Mountains. Using a whole assemblage behavioral indicator, we show that the hominins that manufactured those stone tools do not appear to have differed in terms of the flexibility of the mobility strategies they employed to exploit their landscapes. Rather than biological change, we argue that large-scale climate changes are likely more important drivers of behavioral changes during the Late Pleistocene of the region, including during the Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition. These results agree well with the results of studies having employed this methodology in other regions, suggesting that this is a generalized feature of the transition across Eurasia. Recasting the transition as a mainly ecological rather than purely biocultural process allows us to generate new perspectives from which to approach the question of behavioral change during the Late Pleistocene, and ultimately suggests that the process referred to as the ‘Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition’ is essentially a brief segment of a much more extensive process driven by prehistoric human–environment interactions that would culminate in the highly logistical mobility strategies documented throughout the continent at the Last Glacial Maximum.     

We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with Eduardo Kac

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America.

Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?     

ARE WE HARD‐WIRED TO THINK ABOUT HISTORY?

This book assumes that basic ways of thinking about history are hard‐wired in the brain. Since different styles of discourse with which we talk about the past are hardwired, Blum infers that a protohistorical consciousness is necessary for the existence of language. Historical logics reflect some preconceived part–whole relation. Blum discerns four kinds of part‐whole structure, which he terms continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic. Blum believes that these part–whole relations rest on universal, prereflective intuitions. He concludes that humans have different prelinguistic intuitions of time. Blum claims that people's variable innate temporality is expressed in their historical style. It follows that historical style antedates history as a genre. Hence we are not talking about historical style, but about how individuals apply their sense of the relation between parts and wholes to the problem of time. Our study of historical context becomes secondary to the assumptions we make about the interface between part–whole relations and time. The temporality of history is derivative of a phenomenon that is not historical. Certain conclusions are suggestive. First, modality precedes tense in evolution. Second, we ourselves are continuing to evolve. Blum believes that we are moving “towards a selection of abstract thinkers ruled by pure reason.” Instead of viewing cultures as organisms, it is more profitable to think of the evolution of structures of thinking, and to show that some are more prominent at present than they have been in the past. For Blum, historical thinking is a dependent variable. It depends on tense and modality, which are given before language and culture. Historical thinking reflects a primary experience, but it is not such a primary experience itself.     

Maritime Archaeology in Uruguay: Towards a Manifesto

We report a collaborative maritime archaeological project in Uruguay, one of several Latin American countries where the subject is undergoing review in terms of the ways it is practised and managed. Uruguay is typical of many states where there has been a tension between a heritage-based approach in which the results of investigations are viewed as publicly owned, as opposed to the profit motive in which commercial and personal gain is the underlying ethic. This project was conceived both as a way of assisting the Uruguayan Heritage Commission in promoting the former approach as well as advancing a programme of research into the age of global exploration. This paper sets out the rationale of the initial field season and reflects on subsequent developments.     

Characterisation of obsidian subsource variability at El Paredón,Mexico

Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) geochemical analysis on obsidian from five Formative period (1200 BCE to AC 100) sites from Tlaxcala, Mexico, has revealed that most of the material had similar values to those found in the closest obsidian source, named El Paredón, Puebla. Nevertheless, initial analyses did not resolve whether these materials came from the same caldera or from a specific obsidian deposit. Here we present a methodology that allows the identification of obsidian subsources. The results reveal that Tlaxcalan populations took advantage of a specific obsidian deposit called Tres Cabezas, Puebla, providing valuable new data to identify associated regional exchange networks.