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Juan Luis Rodríguez on his book, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta

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https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/language-and-revolutionary-magic-in-the-orinoco-delta-9781350115767/

Interview by Rusty Barrett

Rusty Barrett: First, for those unfamiliar with Venezuela, could you explain the term “revolutionary magic”?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: I first encountered the term revolutionary magic in one of Fernando Coronil’s interviews where he wondered whether the Bolivarian revolution would be a new iteration of what he called the magical state. Coronil argued back in the 1990s that Venezuela’s dependency on oil put the state in a mediating position between the social body of the nation and both its nature and international capital. This position made the Venezuelan state appear magical to Venezuelans because it had the possibility of carrying out grandiose projects of infrastructure and welfare policies with money that seemed to come from nowhere. The state, without taxing either its citizens or its industries, was in the position to undertake the process of making Venezuela a modern country. This magic, of course, has the downside of depending on the ups and downs of oil prices in the international market. When Chavez was elected to office in 1999, he took office at the end of a long period of economic crisis that extended from 1983 to the end of the1990s. After a few years in office, he found himself as the leader of a revolution (later he will call this turn socialism of the 21st century), and as the Venezuelan president that has managed the largest budget in the history of the country. Since roughly 2004 to the end of 2012 Venezuela received more money from oil exports than at any other time in its history. In this historical period Venezuela combined all the structural features of the magical state with all the utopian desires of a 21st century socialist. The term, revolutionary magic, then refers to the assemblages of performances, political ways of speaking, and infrastructural projects that emerge out of that combination of those factors. If the magic of the Venezuelan state in the 20th century produced a kind of modernity, in the 21st century this capacity was turned to construct a revolution. In both cases, modernity and revolution suffer from the same reliance on the state to scaffold rhetorical and performative apparatuses with an unreliable source of economic success.          

Rusty Barrett: Your work is clearly situated within the discourse-based approach to culture, why did you choose that particular framework? How does this approach address concerns beyond linguistic anthropology?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: I came to learn about discourse-centered approaches to culture during my grad school years studying under Jonathan Hill and Anthony K. Webster. I still remember how reading Jonathan’s work and going to seminar with Tony grounded my work on the idea that I should go after naturally occurring instances of language use emphasizing the centrality of performance and showcasing the complexity of what people say while we do fieldwork. This was very important to me because this is what methodologically separated my work from Coronil’s who rather had the methodological gaze of a historian. I wanted to understand Venezuelan political discourse and gift-giving in the context of the magic of the state (or magical state), but I wanted to do it by paying attention to how people get folded into actual contexts of linguistic interaction where they must engage in actual political speech. The distribution of state resources and the magic of the Bolivarian revolution produced actual instances of language use. I wanted to go after that. Discourse-centered approaches, especially the branch coming down from Joel Sherzer, have always been associated with verbal play, poetics, and performance, and rightly so. I hope that my book shows how discourse-centered approaches to culture can also shed light on questions of political economy, revolution, and modernity that are often not addressed from this perspective.

Rusty Barrett: Your book emphasizes issues of translation and transduction. How are those concepts important for understanding the place of the Warao in Venezuelan politics?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: Part of the transition from what Chavez called the fourth republic into the Bolivarian revolution was a change in the kind of relationships that state institutions, and the Catholic church, had with Indigenous communities. After 1958, when dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was deposed, Venezuelan political parties signed what was known as the Puntofijo pact and embraced representative democracy as a core ideological value. During this period, Indigenous peoples were regarded as potential constituents to be represented by appointed officials from the central government in Caracas. They were supposed to be integrated into Venezuela’s political and economic system, but that future was always imagined as a process of acculturation in which they become undifferentiated citizens who speak Spanish primarily. Their languages were supposed to disappear and, from the point of view of the State, it made sense to translate their oral traditions into Spanish making them cultural patrimony of the nation. In this way the ideals of representative democracy gave a specific directionality to the work of translation from Indigenous language to Spanish because the product of these texts was supposed to represent Indigenous peoples as future integrated citizens of a modern State. The work of the Magical State is to produce modernity, and during this period that meant pulling Indigenous peoples into the orbit of the state. The work of translation followed that logic.

This all changed with the arrival of Hugo Chávez to power. He opposed a new ideal of participatory democracy, and later socialism, to the previous ideology of political representation. This new ideology centered around the notion that people must have a degree of direct participation in the decision-making process and implementation of policies. This new ideological position was central to the writing of the new constitution in 1999. At the same time the circulation of texts and practices of translation was completely reversed. Indigenous peoples were now not supposed to be integrated as culturally and linguistically undifferentiated constituents who needed representation but as subjects who would keep these differences and participate in the democratic process themselves. The constitution, laws that affected Indigenous peoples’ lives, and the symbols of the nation, such as the national anthem, had to be translated into Indigenous languages. That reverted the flow of translation in the hope that it would give Indigenous peoples the knowledge and capacity to participate in the political life of the nation representing themselves in the process.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Bolivarian revolution is how this process of political participation that seemed so good in paper never really took off. Instead, the nominal legal rights to participation have been contradicted with strategies of cooptation that allowed Chavez, and now Nicolas Maduro, to pose as if Indigenous peoples have achieved a degree of integration into the political decision-making process while in practices they marginalize and manipulate this participation. Indigenous peoples in Venezuela have recently faced a deterioration on the conditions of their voting rights as well as a brutal encroachment on their ancestral territories. The Bolivarian revolution has produced some of the most brutal ecological degradations in Indigenous territories through the so-called Arco Minero that only reproduces the logic of capitalist extraction that was supposed to be rejected with the arrival of the revolution.

This brings me to the place of transduction in my book. I understand transduction as the transformations, and assemblage, of signs across semiotic modalities. As I explain at the beginning of the book, the main process of transduction that I am interested in is the transformation of oil revenue into forms of political performances and political influence. Oil revenue support forms of political speech linked with ideologies of modernity and state control in Venezuela. My argument in the book is that despite the reversal on the flow of translations that correlated with a transition from representative to participatory democracy, the basic transduction of oil revenue into modernity and political control remained the same in both periods. In other words, despite rhetorical differences in ideological principles, Chavez’ revolution never really produced a systemic transformation in the structural conditions that marginalized Indigenous subjects in Venezuela. They might have more nominal rights now, but oil dependency still means those rights are principally rhetorical devices. The transduction of oil revenue into political performance and celebrated forms of modernity is an unstable structural condition subject to ups and downs of commodity markets and this means that the revolutionary gains in political participation can disappear at any moment.                      

Rusty Barrett: What aspects of your analysis do you feel are most useful for looking at the relationship between Indigenous communities and the state in places beyond Venezuela?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: I think my analysis is useful for understanding how the integration of Indigenous peoples into public political spheres–and the performative and communicative strategies used for that purpose–depend on kinds of ideological political project made possible by entire political-economic systems. The main goal of my book is to show how discourse-centered approaches to culture can help us accomplish that goal.

Another aspect of my analysis that I think can be useful is to bring attention to the ways in which State actors’ agendas and intentions do not determine the consequences of their actions. I tried to illustrate this point by bringing examples of political gift-giving which is in Venezuela stereotypically regarded as a form of political bribery, corruption, and coercion. I show how the gift per se does not accomplish any of this without further discursive engagement in the communities where is received. Likewise, promises of political gifts do not amount to simple deception since gift-giving and discourse form complex chains of interpretation in the Orinoco Delta. I hope these insights can served to inspire more ethnographic research into how these complex semiotic systems are developed under different political and economic conditions.   

Rusty Barrett: The book provides a language-based approach to understanding political gifts and campaign promises. In what ways do you see this approach as providing insights that might be overlooked by other approaches? What would you hope scholars in other fields take away from your analysis?

Juan Luis Rodriguez: What I would hope other researchers take away from my book is the necessity to see political gift-giving and speech as interrelated. The naturalness of the correlation between gift-giving and political influence that some researchers see in patron-client relationships do not occur without the mediation of a great deal of speech. Paying attention to these patterns allow us to understand how political influence through gift-giving and political promises is an interactional achievement that we cannot take for granted. I would hope that researchers interested in these kinds of questions will take a little more seriously the fact that naturally occurring instances of language use (discourse) provide not only frames for cultural interpretation but are, more importantly, embodied practices that make political gifts feel right or not in a particular social context. Paying attention to that relationship is central to how I study politics through the lens of a discourse-centered approach to culture.

Sam Byrd on his new book, The Sounds of Latinidad

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https://nyupress.org/books/9781479860425/

Interview by Ilana Gershon

If you found yourself at a party explaining that you recently published a book on the music playing in the background, how would you describe The Sounds of Latinidad?

bWhen I explain my research, folks often express surprise that the genres of Latin American and Latino music I studied have such a vibrant scene in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Most often their question is, “Why Charlotte?”  The Sounds of Latinidad is a book not just about Latino immigration, but about how the city influences musical production and consumption and how musicians and their audiences position themselves as urban subjects.  In the case of Charlotte, you have a globalizing financial center whose banks were key players in the 2008 financial crisis.  Latino immigrants were recruited to build the bank towers and continue to fill many of the low wage service sector jobs that support the finance industry.  Latino immigrants are still a very invisible population culturally– they are very visible politically in the sense that Mexican and Central American migrants are the target of much anti-immigrant vitriol– but musically most people still tend to think of the South as a black and white place: birthplace of the blues, country, gospel, or more recently, indie rock, southern rap, etc.  Latino musicians are changing that by bridging U.S. and Latin American genres, becoming southern and Latino.  The sounds of latinidad, and the contributions of other recent newcomers- Asian immigrants, Irish immigrants, northern transplants- are transforming the music of the region to a more globally engaged, diverse field.  But there still remains that feeling, that soul that makes the music southern.

When you describe Latino musicians as workers, you point out that the different bands you studied did not all choose the same paths towards being a band.  Some focused on appearing as professional as possible by showing up on time sober, others on seeming to have as good a time as possible, which can involve considerable amounts of alcohol.  Some spent hours and hours rehearsing, others met only to perform.  I was wondering if you could explain some of the working dilemmas that Latino musicians face in particular that allow for such a wide range of strategies?

In chapter 4 of The Sounds of Latinidad, I thought it vital to consider the working conditions of Latino musicians as work.  Far too often, we tend to conflate the extroverted performance styles that many musicians have and the casual way musical performance permeates our leisure time with play, as in musicians are just playing and not really doing difficult labor.  But my research showed how Latino musicians embody the precarious nature of work that is affecting nearly everybody it seems in a globalized neoliberal capitalist economy: they work gig to gig, receive low pay, are non-union, work irregular and sometime unpredictable hours, at times suffer from wage theft or work for “exposure”, and are subject to the vagaries of the consumption economy.  Their experiences are representative of the larger Latino immigrant population.  Their varying performance styles serve as a way for Latino musicians to define themselves and be defined by their audiences, in a way to “brand” themselves, but also to be part of the musical communities that are renegotiating what it means to be Latino in the face of stiff cultural opposition and misunderstanding on the part of non-Latinos in Charlotte.  In other words, for Banda TecnoCaliente, being professional and sober is part of their desire to present a positive image of Mexican immigrants in the face of negative stereotypes of their compatriots in the mainstream media and even from within the local Latino community.  For bands such as Bakalao Stars, having “as good a time as possible” is part of a strategy to use the consumption of Latino culture to bridge genres and connect to audience members of diverse Latin American origins and to non-Latino audiences.  In terms of working dilemmas, Banda TecnoCaliente has to differentiate themselves from other local bands of regional mexicano music to get hired by festival promoters who see bands as interchangeable parts.  Bands that play in bars and restaurants often employ a strategy of drinking and socializing with their audience to make them feel at home, this can lead to the dilemmas of substance abuse and marital infidelity, but also the further casualization of musicians’ labor as they break down the “fourth wall” of performance.

Given that genres for Latino musicians can so significantly signal race and class, how do these interpretations of what different genres index shape the songs of other artists they choose to cover?

 Musicians play what they know.  One striking aspect about Charlotte’s Latino musicians was their wide-ranging tastes. I subscribe to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that taste is a socially-constructed facet of a person’s class background and habitus. Genres rules can often limit through their rhythm and sound, and through their association with a class identity.  While there is much of this constriction in Charlotte, there also is much borrowing from the diverse streams of culture that immigrants from across Latin America bring to the city.  Because there is no one dominant nationality (and thus genre) that takes precedence, I sense musicians’ openness to trying new ideas.  This is also reflective of  the cosmopolitan nature of popular music genres in Latin America– where Colombian cumbia reinvents itself in Argentina and Mexico, bachata travels outside Santo Domingo,  reggaetón welds together Puerto Rican and Panamian ingredients, or Latin American rock fans grow up idolizing Gustavo Cerati (Soda Stereo) and Slash (Guns N’ Roses). Musicians in Charlotte, I argue, have tried to compile a canon of important songs that they consider vital to cover regardless of genre through an informal process of debate and experimentation during performances. They also engage with their perceptions of what southern music is, integrating blues, jazz, and other American genres into their styles as they interact with local non-Latino musicians.

Some musicians were torn between identifying as Mexican or latinidad, what shaped those decisions and did those decisions change over time?

 “Latino,” “Hispanic” and now “Latinx” are almost entirely United States-specific terms. All the recent immigrants I met identified with their nationality first- Mexican, Venezuelan, Dominican, etc. (and sometimes even the region within the home country) and then begrudgingly Latino or Hispanic next.  I see identifying as Latino as a process that happens as immigrants become long-term residents of the United States and negotiate their new identities as immigrants by interacting with state bureaucracies where they check Latino/Hispanic on forms.  “Latino” also becomes a way to include other immigrants in a common group identity. “Latino” is much more acceptable to the second generation who grows up using the term as part of US identity politics, but increasingly are also the children of mixed-nationality or mixed-ethnicity marriages.  For musicians, the context is important; for certain genres retaining national identity is vital (regional mexicano, for example) while others allow for a more pan-Latino identity.

 You mention that musicians have to be seen to treat their audiences well by giving out a few copies of CDs and so on.  Could you talk a bit about how they use social media to manage this as well?  Are the social media expectations different for Latino musicians than they are for other types of musicians?

  This is a phenomenon to consider in the context of neoliberal economic shifts and the deep (and often devastating) changes technological innovation has wrought on the music industry.  It is now accepted practice for musicians to basically give away their recordings to audiences online (either directly, or though streaming services).  Bands make money through live shows and commercial royalties, if they make money at all. Charlotte’s Latino bands give away CDs to connect with their audience, to convince them to come to future shows, and share the music by word of mouth.  But they also want a tangible product that shows discerning listeners the quality of the music’s production and arrangement (sometimes done at a professional studio with great expense, often on a personal computer using recording software).

Social media is transforming the band-audience interaction.  Innovations like live videos on Facebook allow bands to post rehearsals and shows as they happen to encourage fans to attend, while event pages facilitate publicizing concerts, and band pages become places where people comment and make connections.  It can be a way for an up and coming band to rapidly build an audience.  But does social media presence just become a branding exercise that encourages slick imaging and promotion over musical quality?  Are musicians with less online technological expertise or financial resources, particularly recent, working-class immigrants, being left behind? We shall see.