Well, trail... (an ethnography)

Introduction: The Field Site and the Research Question

Like many of my projects, I set out to study another Other and ended up studying myself. Though I occasionally experience science, art, emotions, thoughts and/or moments as “spiritual” (by which I mean profoundly sublime, harmonic and elegant), I am innately skeptical of representations (especially mass produced and distributed ones) of such experiences. When I first read how some market Cusco as a mystical center of “cosmic energy”, I laughed: I scorn such vague, bland assertions of localized sanctity and Cusco’s touristy center seems far from a holy center. However, during the course of a failed quest to participate in a New Age full moon ritual in the hills above the city, I experienced moments of beauty, tranquility, and elation due to a chance convergence of various symbolic and spatial elements. Though I won’t pretend that I underwent any kind of religious awakening, the experience helped me understand why some tourists might project mystical qualities onto Cusco as well as how the concepts of authenticity, commodification, and space conflict and intersect in the field of spiritual tourism.



The Description


We – four American students in Cusco, Peru, layered in sweaters and coats and beanies for the chilly night – turned off of a street near calle Choquechaca up a stone stairway that held a sign welcoming us towards “Hospedaje Cristo Blanco”. With the full bright moonlight to illuminate our path, we struggled against the steep steps and thin air towards Cristo’s open arms. The staircase died maybe 100 meters from the top, but we found a dirt path winding between the bushes that led us up to a road overlooking Cusco. As we ascended the path, red and gold fireworks exploded over the dotted yellow lights of the city. I could hear the city shuddering below, a white noise euphony of cars purring, dogs yowling and reggaeton blasting from bars.

blurry cusco at night

Once on the road, we encountered a few Cusquenos who asked if we were looking for a taxi or the Plaza de Armas. When we asked about the “templo del mono” they pointed in a general direction down the road that we followed, before veering off onto another dirt path up a sloping hill. After wandering through a wood and down a small valley, we encountered a gravel path that wove through a field of stone. Eventually, we came upon a huge jutting stone cave that we entered with hushed voices, flashlights on, in giddy awe of our discovery. There was a cube carved into one side; one of us speculated that it was an altar. The path through the cave was well polished, obviously well used. Later, I learned that we had stumbled onto the ruin of Sacsayhuaman. When we emerged on the other side, we walked out into a field where we could see Cusco’s lights below, the white moon beaming above and a white column of clouds flash occasionally off in the distance. While one of us (who shall not be named) wandered off to relieve himself/herself, another deposited on the ground orange peels (which had been brought as an offering for the ritual) out of a plastic bag.

Having mostly given up on finding the ritual, we continued to wander, down a large valley toward a huge stone. One of us questioned, “Why are we going down here?”; another immediately answered, “Well, trail…” In the valley, we encountered various mysterious phenomena: old concrete hatches, a (grave?) stone with a name etched in white, rectangular pits carved into the hillside, a stone half-cylinder (tomb?) with a iron door that was buried shut. Not knowing what any of it meant, we eventually wandered down to a road, where we found a stone staircase heading back into the noise and lights and commotion of Cusco’s center.


Interpretation and Findings

This experience made me think a bit about authenticity. I associate authentic experiences with those that express agency and creativity and those that defy instrumental rationality and superficial, commodified relationships and identifications. In these respects, I think I can label our adventure an authentic experience. However, authenticity also always relates to the specific context in which it is identified or performed; as such, our traipsing about through property and ruins we had no prior knowledge of or respect for can be understood as patently inauthentic; or, rather, an inconsiderate colonial encroachment, a defiling invasion of a sacred historical space to fulfill shallow aspirations of adventure.

But this second understanding, like the first, is overly simplistic. The Sacsayhuaman ruins are sold daily to foreign tourists who might conceive of their consumption as adventurous and spiritual, and the ruins as a magical space where they can be transported back in time to an imagined ideal past. The marketing and selling of this space to those who can afford it is far more exclusive and symbolically violent than our transgression of the owner’s property rights. Still, if commodification perverts the experience of this space by idealizing its history to market it and by excluding the dispossessed with an abstract transaction, and yet our subversion of this commodification remains destructive (as commodification and exclusion is to a certain degree necessary to preserve the ruins), is an authentic experience of this space possible at all? Is nothing beautiful or true in this world?!?

The afflicted ambivalence of these questions necessarily reminds me: these are all just words. Authenticity, commodification, space: each can be constructed, collectively and individually, however we like. There are infinite interpretations and experiences, and there isn’t much point fretting over whether I have felt something real or symbolically reproduced a colonial relationship when far more blatantly exploitative power structures are creating, draining and destroying people right now. Certainly, these words have very real implications in the struggle against the fucked-up situation we’re in and need to be addressed. But wrestling with the ambiguity of a well-intentioned but plastic-wrapped offering to the earth or a friend needing to crap near an ancient ruin isn’t going to save anything except maybe my own already over-inflated ego.

Still – to not totally discard the value of this ethnography – I think we can see a seed of the complex and contradictory nature of tourism in my group’s well-intentioned and decently conscientious exploration of the hills of Cusco. The vain struggle for a relatively-defined authenticity, the perversion and necessity of commodification, the exclusivity of locally significant spaces… each concept is essential in grasping towards an understanding of how tourism transforms localities and lifestyles.


Conclusion: Reactions and Reflections

Overall, our journey was goddamn authentic because I say so (with the authority of the author who constructs such meanings out of the relations between symbols). The physicality and purposelessness of the hike, the texture and tranquility of the natural setting, the coincidence of beautiful climactic phenomena and mysterious discoveries… each of these elements and more combined to generate an awesome experience that many might label “spiritual”. At the end of the hike, I could sympathize with those who project a divine cosmic significance onto this city, even as I pitied their contradictory justifications of genetically embodied and localized spirituality. For me, if anything at all is spiritual, then it is everything everywhere. I don’t need a specific person or place or drug in order to find myself or my world, or to see how amazing and beautiful and absurd and terrifying these things are.

(On a side note: Taking any drug is always a religious experience (even if not culturally accepted) in that it shifts your personality, revealing that you are not in control and that identity can only be defined by change; it is a powerfully felt manifestation of the (apparently) perpetually kinetic, transformative nature of the universe. But you don’t need drugs to realize this.)

Still, many people do need spiritual centers or drugs or storytellers in order to find some kind of meaning in their lives (we all need a myth…). And that is totally okay.

Reflections on Lima and Cusco

I don’t really know what to think about any of this so far – these are simple preliminary stupid reactions (I say this with loving forgiveness) – not a clear reflection of experience but a dim warped partial projection. My poetry is ridiculous rambling wordiness because I feel like the efficient sentence structure is inadequate because experience moves outside of language, in shifting clouds, geysers and storms of content before and beyond form. Forgive these momentary romantic clusters that I pretend might be comprehensible or useful.

OK I’ll do the assignment now…. Lima and Cusco, through three lenses…

Sensory
Lima is a condensed bubbling swarm of expansion and acceleration, a sustained bombardment of motion and noise. Horns and motors, voices and footsteps, crowds and commerce and conflict and coping: energy burning, people touching and breathing, the air wet, thick, grey forever.

In many ways this description of Lima could fit any city, including Cusco. There are several notable differences: blue sky and fluffy clouds floating by, SUN on skin and frigid downstairs bedrooms, clear dry thin air and a faint coca-soaked head on edge. In the day, the city is red-brown cobblestones and every-colored plants and bodies on display in the market sprawl and human architecture (construction noise crashing through my roof…) forming a network of paths that interlace; at night, lights dot the hillsides, a mirror reflection of the stars above, while a gleaming white Jesus greets the bright lonesome moon.

Symbolic
Lima is the whole world pressed in on itself, diverse histories copulating in the city’s contours, producing the same new vectors of action and purpose. I am in awe of its self-destructive creativity. Excess amid scarcity; struggle and passion and hopeless hope at the end of the world. It’s a dense endless mystery I skimmed over with a gasp and a sigh.

Cusco is a nebulous slice of that world, but different and deep in its own unique rhythms and spaces. I’m not yet prepared to totalize its symbolic content in vague poetic form as I did for Lima above, but I can say this: I sense a similar representative responsibility here (statues, spray paint coating walls with politics and confessions of love and dirty jokes) but more open social spaces (parks, plazas, playgrounds) and less overtly shiny new developments: the newer buildings around the Plaza de Armas are coated with a veneer of homely antiquity. Like Miraflores, it’s a haven for tourists, but with a different face/façade.

Social
Hotel life in Miraflores now feels a bit absurd: constant uneasy social contact inevitably formed shifting groups of new fast friends, solemn tours and discussions about remembering (whose history?) followed by laughter and plans and forgetting or strange intense discussions about everything and nothing, so many slices of individual history congealed into flavors of personality thrown at each other in a foreign but (for us at least) easy passing context. It was a powerful, fun, profoundly strange experience; I loved it (the discovery, connections, exploration) and hated it (the tourism, indulgence, appropriations). I avoided the blog and did most of the readings but I mainly wanted to live rather than mediate/objectify/transform my experience.

The family dynamic in Cusco is equally absurd, uneasy, endearing, intimate, contradictory, intense, fun and a bunch of other words I know. I have way more privacy, time to process and explore and relax; also plenty of room for overly self-conscious awkward interactions with my “family” as well as improvement, pretending and occasional inability to communicate. The people in Cusco seem to move slower, more quietly and reserved maybe; they also seem more interested in my position as a wealthy tourist.

Elmito y los mitos de Mariategui y Miyagui

The influential Peruvian socialist thinker Jose Carlos Mariategui wrote in his Reflections (from the Peru Reader) that “Myth propels man through history. Without myth, human existence has no historical meaning. Indeed, history is made by those who are possessed and illuminated by higher beliefs, by superhuman hopes; the rest are the drama’s anonymous chorus.” Mariategui believes that history is driven (i.e. social change happens) by the power of myth because mythic forces unite people around a collectively constructed purpose that inspires collective action. I certainly agree that historical social change can arise out of such myths (which are consciously reproduced through discourse and practice). However, I also think that myth can take many forms – religion, philosophy, political or moral ideology, social structures (family, ethnicity, nation), etc. – any teleology or story that can provide a purpose to the traumatic and absurd nature of history and individual experience. Examples include myths of regimented, progressive time, of absolute knowledge (accessible through the elegant, objective methodology of science), of a static and definable personal identity, of rational economic or aesthetic value, of reason, of meaning, etc. The practice of these myths is frequently unconscious in that the myth’s performer might deny that the myth exists, is imagined and/or is historically contingent. Still, these myths pervade the practice of everyday life which constitutes, in totality, through time and space, what we call history.

(on another level, the study of “history” itself can be construed as a myth – a simulacrum of sources, specificities and syntheses that struggles towards an understanding of the present).

Mariategui continues: “The bourgeoisie no longer have any myth. They have turned incredulous, skeptical, nihilist. The old liberal faith of the Renaissance has become anachronistic. The proletariat possess a myth: social revolution. They move toward that vision with a vehement and active faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms…” I read in these words a classic problem with Marxist (bourgeois) intellectuals – their totalizing projections onto heterogeneous masses who, in reality, have probably never heard of social revolution, and likely remain unconscious of the various myths (in my formulation above) that inundate the rhythms of everyday existence with meaning and purpose. The real myth of the proletariat for Marxists is that the proletariat exists as a discrete, qualifiable unit that yearns for real equality and freedom (a myth that nevertheless has mobilized direct action in Peruvian and global history).

Furthermore, I partially disagree with Mariategui’s assertion that the bourgeoisie have no myth. Rather, I think the bourgeoisie have no myths of which they are conscious, but plenty of which they remain unconscious: myths of equality by formal signification, of the end of racism, sexism, and even history itself, of unambiguous scientific progress, of agency/self-creation through consumerism, of individual freedom from (rather than through) society, of a painless, planned out life that might never end, of endless expansion and acceleration without consequence, of liberalism’s ideal marriage of capitalism and democracy. None of these myths mobilize self-conscious, transformative action; nevertheless they drive many present political and social developments and thus create history.

In the above piece, Jorge Miyagui uses Mariategui’s conception of a self-conscious “mobilizing myth” in an interesting way. In an ironic syncretism of words and icons, Miyagui tags Mariategui’s image onto the belly Sesame Street puppet Elmo; the words “Elmito” (alternately meaning “little Elmo” and “the myth” in Spanish) float above. Miyagui explained the piece as a playful representation of Mariategui’s rallying cry for a popular myth to mobilize action. By employing perhaps a little too much of my scholarly license, I’d like to interpret this “infinite sign” through the framework I developed above.

For me, Elmo, Sesame Street and indeed most (inter)nationally distributed television programs function to socialize children with standardized systems of moral, communicative, and rational knowledge. In such respects Elmo can represent the bourgeois myths of achieving universality and formal equality through alienating technologies; this unconscious bourgeois idealism is mythic not merely by its imaginary substance, but also by its reproduction through the sharing of stories (via the hegemonic pathways of media and education).

It initially disturbed me that Mariategui would be pasted onto and conflated with Elmo; on further reflection, this serves as a powerful critique of the exploitation of iconography, and of utopian socialism as well as a rallying cry for a leftist counter-hegemony.

First, the critique: as we’ve seen in numerous artists work (Miyagui, Javi Vargas, Alfredo Marquez) Mariategui is a powerful figure who has inspired feelings of hope, courage, and solidarity for leftist activists; accordingly, his image (three of the most commonly circulated seen above) has become reproduced into an icon, a symbolic vessel that alludes to more than his life and ideas but more broadly to the emotional experience of activist struggle. As such, the sign has in many cases replaced its original substance - the icon, “cross-dressed” (as Vargas put it) to suit various purposes, alludes to past reproductions of the icon rather than to the person behind the image’s work. We have seen such exploited iconography in the invocations of Maria Elena Moyano, Jose Maria Arguedas and Tupac Amaru II (as well as Che Guevera and Mao Tsedong) in street art, mass media, and government and radical propaganda (both visual and language-based). Pasting Mariategui onto Elmo’s body can be interpreted as a critique of how existentially concrete, limited and dead humans can become transformed into icons, domesticated into gentle, fuzzy abstractions that, like Elmo, can be used to project any ideology, so long as it remains concealed behind an emotionally stimulating symbol.

This relates directly to the critique of utopian socialism I’m reading into Miyagui’s piece. As Mariategui explained above and I elaborated, a lot of socialist theory is powered by myths – myths of economic reductionism, clear class distinctions, dialectical materialism, universal consciousness, revolution, utopia, etc. – but what interests me even more in relation to Elmito is how socialist myths have been subsumed by hegemonic myths of tolerance and progress. As Elmo digests Mariategui (or worse, has a Mariategui tattoo), socialist discourse and dreams (wherein lies a powerful potential for radical social change) have been consumed, diluted and tokenized by a relatively “tolerant” mass society – in the totalizing language of some artists and intellectuals, in charity work justified as part of a process, in radical politics courses taught to future capitalists, in this blog post’s vague allusions and impotent reflexive paralysis – this trajectory has been described by Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man as “institutionalized desublimation”. This is particularly fascinating in Peru, where a 20 year period of horror, insanity, violence, destruction and terror spurred by a Marxist insurrection (and more generally, national conflicts surrounding class, race, inequality, urbanization, imperialism, modernization/westernization/development/exploitation/liberalism/etc.) spurred a conservative reaction that has labeled leftist critics of the state as terrorists. Still, such critiques have not been driven entirely underground towards violent revolutionary action because such destruction has proven insane and futile, and there exists safer paths of expressing discontent such as art.

Now, by no means am I advocating violence as the only “true” negation of state and culture nor am I rejecting art as pointless or pathetically “safe”. Rather, I’m suggesting that Miyagui’s piece raises fascinating questions about the potentially “demobilizing” myths (of historical determinism, of already existing solidarity, of a transcendent purpose) that Marxism and art can inspire when functioning within the neoliberal logic of tolerance and commodification.

Finally, with the potentially critical aspects of Miyagui’s piece in mind, I think Elmito functions most powerfully as a rally cry towards developing a myth that might utilize the already-hegemonic discourses (progress, universality) and technologies (iconography, kids shows) suggested by Elmo in combination with the transformative potential of Mariategui. Such fusion of the hegemonic and the subversive could succeed in developing a radical counter-hegemony (once suggested by Gramsci) that might mobilize widespread consciousness and action. Indeed, this suggestion mirrors the nature of Miyagui’s work, which itself constitutes a fusion of culturally-specific symbolism that, by its syncretic nature, moves beyond the isolating specificity of its origin towards a transcultural iconography that can explain a historical purpose and demands deliberate practice. Perhaps Miyagui himself provides the answer to the questions he provokes.

…

But what right do I have to project such absurd depth into an artist’s momentary playful flight of imagination? I’m not sure if I believe or even agree with everything I’ve written above – it’s occasionally callous, illogical, downright silly – I doubt Jorge will be entirely pleased with the work (not that I need him to). After all, I disagree that art is any more an infinite symbol than anything else is; original intent matters, and outsiders projections onto the meaning of powerful cultural objects that they don’t entirely understand isn’t exactly cool. This is a problem I’ve had with a lot of my academic work. Oh well, I’ll give up on this post for now and return to this later…maybe…

Art and politics: representation, production, and reproduction

In this program, we are studying art and politics: the political context, implications and potentialities of art, and the art of political ritual, performance, representation and criticism. These practices intersect richly in the context of recent and deep Peruvian history. Though the desire to congeal experiences and memories into objects seems common to most humans (who like to build things, create words, take pictures, write blogs, etc), in Peru in particular I can sense a passion for committing oneself to creating community and history by the process of self-objectification: pouring ones time, energy, personality, skill, ideology, desires, thoughts and emotions into an object that reflects the convergence of these activities. Such “objects” are nearly always artistic and political, regardless of whether they take the form of an artisanal retablo (seen above), repeated performances for tourists, abstract aesthetically-motivated paintings or propaganda scrawled on a wall; they are all artistic for their intent to represent, to produce and share meaning; they are all political as they are produced by actors enmeshed in transforming social-historical processes and the objects themselves change the world by their existence.

As reflections of and reactions to social realities, art can reproduce or revolutionize politics; as producer/product of these same realities, politics can reproduce or revolutionize art. Art is an intentional, self-conscious act of production that serves to re-present the context from which it is produced; politics is a historically emergent, frequently unconscious act of social reproduction that represents an imagined collective reality. For this reason, studying art is essential to studying politics (and vice versa). Though each produces and becomes produced by the other, art’s conscious nature (as apparently absurd, irrational, instrumentally useless, a purely social-psychological phenomena that must justify itself) distinguishes it. From within this conscious act of creating meaning, we can identify and extract the unconscious historical/political/social representations which it reflects and/or reacts against.

For example, in “Aguas Profundas”, a theatrical work we experienced in the impoverished but self-made Villa El Salvador district of Lima, the overt theme of water crisis mirrored the anger and anxieties surrounding local/global environmental catastrophe and the inefficient, unequal distribution of water in Lima. Specific elements further reflected the social realities of life in Villa El Salvador: the props buried within the set echoing the ubiquitous piles of garbage lining the streets; absurd performances by white devils and sonorous politicians; a pervasive sense of loss, grief, hopelessness but also solidarity and struggle as the only possible course of action. By producing this work, Teatro de Vichama has changed Villa El Salvador itself, perhaps granting it some prestige as an artistic haven and even hope for more “bread and beauty”.

affirming artisan pride, a political position, and a football club (Alianza Lima) 

More than anything so far, I’ve loved the rich sense of representative responsibility (i.e. a consciousness of the power of symbolism and the necessity of sharing meaning) When walking through Lima, street art of various forms (mostly graffiti, election slogans and some murals) decorates most open or unprotected walls; in many areas it dominates the visual-symbolic content of the space (over advertisements). Political strife and moments of solidarity painted onto the surface of the city, reflecting an election that reflected the convergence of greater historical processes (anxieties surrounding war, race, property). Other forms of symbolism lie behind and around the paint, in the government buildings, monuments, and the general city layout – each reflections and in a sense, collective representations of a history of colonialism transformed and camouflaged into the story of neoliberal progress – a story and reality that, according to sociologist Victor Vich, Peruvian artists have been reacting to for the past decade.

How should I react to these reflections? What is my purpose and position as the observer of these processes? (I’ll reflect on these questions in future posts, hopefully in more concrete, less obscure ways…)