Comments: Ambiguity and Contradiction

in the Analysis of Race and the State

The past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to
disappearirretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
fflhebeghnerwhohaslearnedanewla^^

Karl Marx
TheattempttQ talk about new events wih ckllanguage andmeanings, stretches thehngjageanddevdcp6newniearings.

William Roseberry1
These four articles explore from different temporal and thematic angles
the complex trajectory of modernity in Guatemala. While Todd Iittle-Siebold
and John Watanabe analyze two distinct moments in the transition from colonial to early Republican Guatemala, Abigail Adams and Christa Little-Siebold
are both concerned with the tensions between contemporary local and national images and processes of modernization. Notwithstanding this temporal divide, all four articles are situated at the disciplinary crossroads of anthropology and history. Therefore, all four are concerned with the historidzation
of meaning. John Watanabe asks about the cultural politics of visitas by jefes
politicos to remote villages such as (in the particular case he studies)
Huehuetenanago; Christa and Todd Little-Siebold inspect the meaning of
identity labels in several local villages while also questioning the prevalence of
dominant Indian/ladino dichotomies as the sole classificatory system; Abigail
Adams is concerned with the intertwined modern and traditional meanings
that a group of Q'eqchi' Maya assign to the image of "roads."
As it is in these four articles, "meaning" has also been a central concern of
anthropologists. However, for a long time in most ethnographic works meanThejournul of Lain American /l/7/vt>po/o<i>y6(2):2'i2-266 copyright 2001, American Anthropological Association

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Marisol de la Cadena
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
ingeither as text, structure, or functionloomed alone,floatingin a definition of culture as "mental structure" or "system of symbols" that lacked the
force of actors and was devoid of the social relations through which signification was created, transmitted, rejected, or accepted. Following several pioneering efforts (Wolf 1982; Cohn 1987; Mintz 1985; Sahlins 1985) we anthropologists have sought to remedy these problems by introducing both
history and power in our analysis. At the same time historians were trying to
recover for their discipline the notion of culture, and as a result we have met
them halfway. As Watanabe mentions, the initial period of this encounter
implied an interesting paradox. On the one hand anthropologists, searching
to integrate the non-European world into the global forces of historical time,
appeared to neglect local cultural histories, or to subordinate its dynamics to
the forces of world capitalism.2 In turn, historians' search of culture usually
trapped them in actorless webs of meaning or dumped them into deep and
obscure structures devoid of any sense of process.3
In spite of the initial frustrations, these efforts have resulted in a different
kind of encounter, at a rich inter-disciplinary crossroads that makes of history and culture inseparable, mutually infiltrating categories. The condition for
this encounter is a redefinition of culture as socially constituting and socially
constituted, and of history not only as written but also, and critically, as writing (cf. Roseberry 1989). Thus redefined, history is viewed as a subject replete
with culture, and meaning is conceived as historically achieved and explained.
Borrowing from Benjamin (1969:261), at these crossroads history becomes a
subject "whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but timefilledwith the
presence of the now," where the "now" does not refer to a chronologically
defined present but to significant and signifying momentsfilledwith the presence ofrneaning-gMng, socially related, agents/actions. From this viewpoint, history

defies a definition that confines it to the past, allows for ethnography to be

about more than the present, and lets us anthropologists write ethnographic

Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State

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histories of de-reified pasts and presents that are replete with signifying (and
thus material) presences. In one way or another, all four articles contribute to
further these crossroads as they attempt to understand how actions, meanings, and people are mutually constituted. Specifically, all four articles remind
us that the process of modernity in Latin America did not homogenize meanings or peoples.
Illustrative of this heterogeneity of meaning, and of Mintz's sharp insight
that "people's agreeing on what something is, is not the same as their agreeing
on what it means" (1985:158) is Abigail Adams's analysis of the Tzuultaq'a,
the mountain valley spirits which Q'eqchi' individuals from San Juan Chamelco
(Verapaz) identify as "roads" and travelers. Yet their specific meanings change
as SanJuanenos latch the Tzuultaq'a onto different local events, persons, or
symbols thatlike roads and travelersconnect San Juan with outside places
(such as the United States, Guatemala City, or the Peten). Powerful in Adams's
analysis is her treatment of the Tzuultaq'a as "myth-historical" categories whose
meanings are historically negotiated in association with locally significant moments, persons, and processes. Through Adams's analysis San Juanenos appear as representing their own history with their own imagery, but still connected with national and global events, in a relation of subordination, which
however does not imply the disappearance of local interpretations. Rather,
through the Tzuultaq'a the Q'eqchi' formulate local resignifications of "outside" occurrences, and thus present them as historically integral to San Juan
Chamelco. I would like to think of the Tzuultaq'a as the expression of a
specific form of historical Maya consciousness, that while integrating itself
with Guatemala, produces an alternative modernity that, for example, does
not separatelike Western forms of modernity do"religious" from "nonreligious," or "material" from "symbolic." Adams's paper presents some of
the stories thatfillGuatemalan modernity with competing possibilities, and
make its articulation ceaselessly contingent, subject to the works of powersituated (powerful and powerless) actors. The texture of this beautiful paper
could have gained an extra dimension if the author would have shared with
us more of her ethnography. If, for example, instead of presenting the different meanings already attached to "roads" and Tzuultaq'a, she would have
led the reader through the social interactions that created, interpreted, transformed and reproduced these meanings. How do individual and differentiated Q'eqchi' (rather than Q'eqchi' in general) decide which "outside" events
to appropriate? How do they incorporate them in local processes of signification? In a nutshell: I was left longing for more of the keen ethnographic
work, and the linguistic talent, that is at the heart of Adams's work.
To get at the heart of meaning, and to do so historically (even when
writing about the presentlike Adams does) is one of the drives of current
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antliropological works. I see John Watanabe's "procedural culture" as an interesting methodological proposal in that direction. It is a conceptual tool that
both historians and anthropologists can use, like he says, to read historical
documents with an ethnographer's eyes, and hence reinstate cultureand thus
the process of meaningin analyses of power, and thus. The bottom line
question can thus be: how does power become culturally visible to groups
that see themselves as different?1 Rather than looking at the ways in which the
groups interact separately, Watanabe's "procedural culture" is a forceful claim
to look for the common cultural grounds where historically differentiated
peoples interact. Implicit in this claim is the important idea that even as power
exceeds cultural boundaries and articulates unequal relations among differentiated groups, this does not preclude the formation of fields of signification
across such differences. Procedural culture thus complicates the idea of difference by suggesting that it emerges from co-participation in the same historical timethe Benjaminian "time of the now." Situated in this time, actors
engage (albeit unequally) in processes of signification and re-signification that
transpire across their social, cultural, economic, and ideological differences.
Emerging from such processes, social relations are multi-layered, and their
complex heteroglossia is a far cry from neatly coinciding with the grid of
social differences. As Watanabe's brief historical-ethnographic analysis shows,
the participation of differentiated social actors in a network of historically
common relations, should prevent us from mechanically assuming that cultural differences among groups account for homogeneity of interests within
them.
Along with this inspiring potential, Ifindsome problems with Watanabe's
proposal.
Obviously, not everything about culture is shared meaningfulnessand
the author knows that. It seems to me that his emphasis on "meaningfulness"
has eclipsed disagreement from being methodologically included in "procedural culture." He writes:
In any given interaction, such personalized understandings give interlocutors a
range of conventional options that extend as far across their linguistic, cultural,
and personal knowledge as imagination and intelligibilityaWow. What actually
gets said and done, and especially t/ieniean^^aflTibutec/tD it, take shape against
this backdrop of knowing familiarity with what might have reasonably or
unreasonably happened instead, in this and analogous contexts. Constrained
mote by the limits ofmWTingfUness&i^i is, rathomahfe intelligibility^ratherthan
by any strict conformity to specific meanings or opinions, individuals'
conventional understandings provide ample latitude for both conformity
and contention. (145) [emphasis added]

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Although in many passages Watanabe warns us that understandings can

be different across groups, misunderstandings seem to be absent from his procedural culture. Useful in this context is Roseberry's (1989) idea that talking
about new events with old language and meanings stretches the language and
develops new meanings, even if at the risk of initialand even enduring
misunderstandings. I would suggest that rather than being constrained by the
limits meaningfulness, it is by disregarding those limits, and thus producing
misunderstandings people produce difference itself, and not only interact across
it. These moments that entail the production of difference occur relentlessly
within shared (yet differentiated) cultural spaces, and can be included in
Watanabe's procedural culture by focusing on how meaningless procedures
acquire cultural visibilitythrough mistakes and disagreements on their meaningand are thereon accepted, rejected, transformed, and may even as remain meaningless, yet they are present. My second criticism relates to
Watanabe's interpretation of hegemony. like him, I think that hegemony cannot take the conceptual place of culture. Yet, by the same token, I do not see
the conceptual or methodological need to use procedural culture instead of
hegemony. I disagree with analyses that assume that "resistance comes from
below" and "imposition from above"and heartily coincide with Watanabe's
criticism of such conceptualizations of hegemony. Yet those are far from
being the only ones. On the contrary, there are myriad ways in which hegemony has been used both by anthropologists and historians. Certainly some
of them, drawing from Raymond Williams, define hegemony in ways that
overlap with culture.5 Others assume a polar opposition between state and
popular resistance.6 And others (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 199D distinguish hegemony from ideology, and from culture. However, like with any
other abstraction, hegemony does not have a fixed definition, nor can it be
"applied" like a free-floating analytical device innocent of historical content
(cf. Sayer 1987). I would argue the problem is not with using or not using
hegemony (or any other concept for that matter) but with the historicityor
lack thereofof its definition or, even more so, of its usage. Thus, rather
than the concept, John Watanabe's perspective is critical of a specific methodological deployment of the notion of hegemony: one that mechanically imagines
cultural differences as polarized fields of resistance and oppression. Yet, informed by a historical perspective, and distinguished from culturewhich
from a Gramscian perspective is one of the fields in which it operates
hegemony can also be a very effective conceptual tool topreciselyundo
polarities. In my recent study of peasant upheavals in Cuzco, to use an example that I am obviously familiar with, I used hegemony to understand a
multi-stranded conflict in which indigenous political leaders demanded locallevel access to the state (rather than simply opposing it) by, among other things,
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proposing a definition of Indianness that had room for literacy. This struggle
for access to the state and for literacy contested dominant definitions of
Indians as illiterate and that excluded Indians from official political participation on this basis. The indigenous struggle, however, did not have a polar
antagonist, and it was waged within the discourse of progress which indigenous Andean politicians conjured up to demand participation in the state
and to insist on their rights to citizenship as literate indigenous Peruvians. In
this use of hegemony I was inspired by current conceptual proposals (Hall
1986; Williams 1977). But my main source of inspiration came from Gramsd's
texts (and footnotes) in the Prison Notebooks and from some ethnographic
histories (Fox 1989; Feierman 1990). From these I assembled a notion of
hegemony which was simultaneously an abstraction and a methodological
tool that I used to analyze the moves of concrete historical agentsindigenous and non-indigenous intellectualsacting in and across specific cultural
fields. Following these dominant and subordinate agents ethnographically
and using theory as prelude, rather than as end in my historical inquiry (cf.
Corrigan and Sayer 1985)it was impossible for me to inscribe state officials
or "Indians" into ready-made abstract scripts of simplified resistance and
domination. On the contrary, I was able to do what Watanabe claims is not
done through hegemony: find alliances across differences, antagonisms within
similarities, and therefore multiple trends and possibilities for negotiation.
More importantly, I was able to observe a complex panorama in which
social relations were articulated through multi-layered links of power, where
dominant and subordinate sides, while structurally related, did not act in unidimensional fashion: for example, either dominating or resisting.
From my perspective, the visitas by jefes politicos can be analyzed in
similar terms: as part of the process of a transition to modernity, which in
Peru and Guatemala, as in most of Latin America, entailed the simultaneous
transformation of colonial subjects into modern citizens and the production
of modern nation-states. Both processes were shadowed by notions and
feelings of race and progress which, albeit from different perspectives, were
lived by assorted populations whose previous official and unofficial identitiesas Todd Iittle-Siebold explains in his articlewere unsettled, precisely
as part of the process of producing both citizens and the republican state.
Following some of Watanabe's suggestions, I would argue that "procedural
culture" in the 19th century, was a shared field of signification, in whose production participated individuals enacting relationships prescribed by old identities and by the need to produce new ones. These individuals engaged in
producing a republican state in which old differences were being transformed
under the influence of liberal agents, which however continued to partake of
colonial structures of feelings and power. Thus historicized, this context does
Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State

257

not lend itself to simplistic oppositional relationships between "the state" and
"the people." Moreover, rather than choosing between procedural culture or
hegemony, both notions can be combined to follow the complex processes
by which "the state" was concretely (yet inchoately) produced by central authorities from the capital of Guatemala, by jefes politicos, and by local villagers as they interacted in diverse scenarios like the visitas that Watanabe documents. Asritualsof state-formation, the visitas were arenas for the inscription
of citizenship, and spaces where forms of ruling and meanings of identities
were negotiated among diverse actors, whose political agendas did not overlap with the consensually defined "cultural differences," even as the relationships among them were organized by uneven distributions of power.
As Todd Little-Siebold illustrates, the efforts to polarize the differences
between state and people and tofixatethe identities of the latter as either Indian
or ladino stemmed from policy attempts to modernize Guatemala. Todd
little-Siebold's article analyzes one of the most intriguing periods in the history of Latin America: the decades that stretched from Independence in the
1820s, to the latter decades of the 19th century. During this incipient republican and hardly (or only partially) post-colonial moment ideas about the possibility for the existence of Latin American nations were both conspicuously
professed in public oral and written demonstrations, and profoundly doubted
in the intimacy of homes. The latter is an aspect that Benedict Anderson
(1991) missed, for he built his representations of the Creole pioneers of nationalism by investigating primarily the public arena of the period, where the
comraderie and optimism (required to transform the multifarious castas into
undifferentiated Americans) seemingly displaced feelings of exclusion and
pessimism. Yet, a cursory look into private life can reveal the intense anxiety
that the reverberations of the European Enlightenment created in Latin
American elites, as the increasing demands for secularization, rationality, and
scientific progress convinced them of the dangers of backwardness, and
even degeneration, if they did not control the Indians, blacks (and their feared
mixtures) that peopled their newly independent region.
Born in trepidation, Latin American nationalism was not only a de-colonizing venture. (Mignolo 2000; Klor de Alva 1992) The almost two centuries
spanning since its early inception to its relatively systematic implementation,
were also crucial years for the conceptual-political reordering of the world.
Thus situated, Latin American nationalism becomes a quasi-oxymoronic venture produced in dialogue with, and even adjusting to, an international colonial capitalist order that organized profoundly hierarchical relations between
Europe and the rest of the world, and was articulated by the emerging and
intertwined discourses of race, civilization, and progress. Transferred to Latin
America, these discourses appropriated, rather than displaced, colonial cat258

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egories of religious-based difference. Gradually, as they (and the labels attached to them) achieved meaningfulness, the new discourses of difference
levied newel significations on old identity labels.7 Thus, for example, the meaning
of blood eventually changedfrom a representation of religious descent and
lineage membership to instead mean the veins, the alleged biological carriers
of inheritable traits. But it took a while for the old language of blood to
acquire its new racial meanings, and even when it did, it did not necessarily
shed previous ones. Judging from the examples in Christa Little-Siebold's
article, even in 20th-century Guatemala blood has not become an exclusive
biological signifier but instead continues to connote ancestry and lineage membership.
Thus, as Todd Little-Siebold argues, there is much to learn if we focus
on continuity, for, as Marx suggested more than a century ago, "the beginner
who has learnt another language always translates it to her mother tongue."
And the language of calidadthe mother tongue of colonial Latin American
identitieswas neither simple, nor uniform as Todd Little-Siebold rightly
states. His contribution is precisely to highlight the geo-political complexities
of identities, and therefore to call our attention to the difficulties of normalizing Guatemalans into either Indians or Ladinos. Not only where there many
identity labels in what was to become Guatemalathey also had different
local meanings, which as this author reminds us, may have well continued its
way (even if surreptitiously) into the newly minted Indian and Ladino identities. But as Marx's quote also conveys, focusing on continuity alone, and looking for it mostly at the local (subordinate) level, may lead us to miss the
complexity of the new classificatory order. Moreover, looking for "continuity" in the peripheries while assuming "change" in the center risks introducing
another set of dichotomies, which canrigidifyour analysis. Thus, it becomes
necessary to look at how old categories and the classificatory orders to which
they belonged acquired new meaningsthose infused to them by the language of racewithout necessarily shedding the old ones. And this occurred
everywherein centers and peripheries alike, where ever historically located
people lived their everyday lives.
Andeanist historians working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries have
recently begun investigating the encounter between early colonial orders of
difference (casta, calidad, honor, and linaje) and the modem notions of race that
emerged in those years. (Graubart 2001; OToole 2001; Burns 1999; Estenssoro
2000). At the turn of the 19th centurythe budding years of Latin American
nations and liberalism"calidad" rivaled with, but was not displaced by "scientific education" as a marker of status. My own research suggests that rather
than disappearing, early colonial orders of difference, and the labels attached
to them Omite/D, cuaiteron, mestizo, sakoatias, criollo, indio, indigena, ladino)dfc\ ncX
Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State

259

disappear. They did, however, grow with new meanings, as people and the
state (through its own people) interacted in a national and international system
that was being re-arranged around the increasingly pervasive order of race.
Worldwide this order was ambiguous. Among other aspects, it included culture, biology, religion, nationality, as well as the continued effort to pull them
apart, and thus to purify "race"fromwhat it allegedly was not. Specifically, in
Latin America the shift to "race" was a very impure process of modernization underpinned by old beliefs and actual hierarchies, which never succeeded
at separating "biology" from "culture." This ambiguity might have proved
instrumentalfor it allowed the emergence of a notion of whiteness that
was more than skin-deep, and therefore "color" (or, more accurately, the lack
of it) was the result of status, rather than its precondition. One of the most
interestingif understatedfeatures of Todd Little-Siebold's article is precisely that it underscores the conundrum that whiteness represented as a possible identity for elite Guatemalans, those labeled Espanoles in the pre-Independence years. His list of "Identity Labels for the Kingdom of Guatemala,"
implicitly shows that "whiteness" was not an official local identity. Since
Espanoles were not labeled white, under which guise where they incorporated into Guatemalan nationalist discourse? Apparentlygiven the incipient
stage of "whiteness" in America in generalnationalist Guatemalan elites
werefirstincorporated into the "Ladino" category. This opens questions that
have yet to be answered: When does "whiteness" appear as a Guatemalan
identity? And then, what does it mean, and who is entitled to such label? In
Peru it comes into sight hesitantly in the late 18th century, and then only within
lineages with long-standing Spanish and indigenous ancestries. By the end of
19th century, Peruvian "whiteness" was a novel and uncomfortable category,
that provoked assorted reactions in elite thinkers. While some limited it to the
coast (and even to Lima) and qualified it as having a particular hue, indeed
different from that of Euro-Americans, others questioned Peruvian forms
of whiteness, presenting it as a foreign inclined, anti-nationalist fabrication.
Embedded in vacillations, "whiteness" entered the 20th century as an unclear,
even "foreign," categoryand, as Christa Little-Siebold's article suggests, it
lingers as such. The "visible invisibility of whiteness" (in Guatemala, and in
other places of Latin America) does not only correspond to the usual privilege of the center to go unnamed. It is also a result of its dubious genealogy,
of its lack of clarity, and ultimately of people's generalized awareness that
local "whiteness" does not match dominant Euro-American versions of it.
Neither of this, of course, precluded the emergence of "white folks" as a privileged racial-cultural groupbut their whiteness was not about skin color alone.
A feature that Guatemala shares with other Latin American countries
(including Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia) is that racialized nation-build260

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ing projects (concerned with the assimilation of "indigenous populations")

officially silenced both blackness and whiteness. The silencing process was
disparate as it implied the creation of whiteness (and its placement as the superiorracialnorm) and the eviction of blackness (considered the most inferior
racial group) from national images. In Peru, the imagined eviction of "blacks"
(slave descendants) was facilitated by the role that geography and environmental determinism played in racial thought. Defined as Africans (not Americans) and thus allegedly alien to the climate and (via environmental determinism) to the culture of the nation, "blacks" could become Peruvians by
assimilating through wage labor in coastal haciendas and the surrounding
villages. This milieu would supposedly most aptly absorb the former slaves'
warm-weather culture, music, and cuisine. Whiteness, on the other hand, was
created with the help of the liberal language of decenda that blended the previously differentiated espanol and criollo into a unified Peruvian upper- and
middle-class identity. This category continued the colonial sense of calidad
with allusions to gente decentes alleged proper moral, and indeed, disregarding
their (skin-deep) color when necessary. This historical legacy has made of
"whiteness" one of the most analytically complex, literally obscure, and politically touchy issues in Latin American racial formations, as it hits a sensitive
nerve in the elite's power system.
Unlike Fanon's experience of his own blackness 8 a clear cut "skin
color" fact that was not altered by class, education, or manners, the experience of, for example my own whiteness (in spite of my brown skin) in Latin
America is not straight forward. On the contrary, it requires recognition that
in cases like mine (middle class and educated) brown skin denies and does not
deny my whiteness. This contradiction is at the heart of the Peruvian formation of whiteness, and is the source of its joys and sorrows. My brown
skinned signals my non-EuroAmerican originsand therefore denies my
whiteness; yet it does not, by itself, indicate stigmatized (class, geographic, or
moral) origins. Moreover, accompanied by elite education and "proper birth"
brown skin does not deny national forms of dim whiteness, those that (unlike Christa's clear whiteness) are not questioned locally. The contradiction that
articulates Peruvian whiteness transpires, I would argue, because of the convergence in skin color of intertwined colonial and modern criteria of distinction, both of them equally prevalent. Silencing whiteness, and replacing it with
a profusion of references to decencxi (that include brown-skinned whites like
me) represents a socially produced historical response that skirts the contradiction, while at the same time maintaining it. Keeping the contradiction within
analytical scope has been essential to my understanding that modern and colonial markers of difference (such as skin-deep color, place of origin, income, occupation, language, education, or religious background) historically
Ambiguity and Contradiction in the Analysis of Race and the State

261

infiltrate each other to constitute the variable, yet interdependent, gendered

and classed discourses of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Neither "whiteness" nor "blood" are biological traits only. Even when they respond to
modern racial orders, they are tinted by religion, moral, and status. With the
consolidation of racial thought, colonial markers of status conspicuously lingered. Along with ideologies of liberal capitalism, they converged in a structure of hierarchical feelings that has shaped social formations where markers
of difference have meanings that are not necessarilyor completelypredetermined, but rather depend on the junctural constellation of forces that
shape specific social relations. Thus brown skin does not have meaning in and
of itself; it can occasionally be an attribute of a white person, depending
(alas!) of whose body it wraps up.
These are some of the complexities that Christa little-Siebold faced during her fieldwork in Quezaltepeque. As she carefully explains for the case of
Guatemala, in Latin American, modern classifications are intricate hybrids of
indigenous and Western, old and new, orders of differences, their languages
and meanings. Thus, people's appearance," she writes, is the result of a multiplicity of factorsof which phenotype is only one. Hence, the author's
hesitation to define a label on one single ground, be it race, ethnicity, or class.
Muhto, ladino, indigenous, zambo, or w/iite(and by the same token any other labeD
express a variety of social conditions that cannot be reduced to modern
notions because they exceed them. Articulating social relations in Quezaltepeque,
these labels interrupt the modern, official "Indian-Ladino" (or Indian-Mestizo) dichotomy integral to Latin American assimilationist nation-building
projects. The dichotomy fixed otherwise mercurial identities, and thus provided a stable ground for the recording of statistics regarding education,
urbanization, and sexual morality (statistically measured by the number of
marriages and children born out of wedlock). Yet, as Christa Little-Siebold
illustrates for Guatemala, in most cases the dichotomy did not erase other
labelswhich interfere with the homogenizing function that the central state
assigned to the "Indian-Ladino" couple, and alter their dominant meaning,
without erasing the dichotomy, and even incorporating some of its evolutionary impetus. (Such are the works of hegemony!!) Thus Ladinos can be
white and therefore "pure blooded"but some of them are also Indian
although "Indian" is a category that many Quezaltepecos find objectionable,
and replace (or skirt) it with the label of "naairales." The resignification of
official labels, and particularly the tendency to reject Indianness as a self-ascribed identity, resonates with the case of Peru where disagreement about the
meanings of mestizo persists. While middle- and upper-class individuals currently use the label to disdainfully identify allegedly uneducated "chcte'Tworkingclass Spanish-speaking individuals), some indigenous groups disrupt the di262

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chotomy by self-labeling as mestizos, without however giving up their claims

to Andean culture. To them although mestizaje does not replace being indigenous, it does reflect their education and economic achievement, which does
distinguish them from Indians whom they, in turn, consider uncouth and
ignorant.
The heteroglossia of labels suggested in Christa Little-Siebold's article
echoes Goldberg's idea that "in the shift from imposition to self-interpretation, received terms are rarely if ever entirely synonymous of self-assumed
ones."(Goldberg 1993:9) Our next challenge should be to explore the
heteroglossia of meaning historically and in connection with the fluidity of
identities that seems to recur in the Andes and in Guatemala (even if differently). Moving away from the modern notion of identity as individual and
exclusive, let's approach ethnographically the mercurial identities and let their
fluidity inform us about the notion of identity itself. Understanding the current complexity of identities requires inspecting non-modern (Western and
non-Western) modes of identification and their articulation with modem ways,
and therefore their silencing and subordination, but by no means obliteration.
The interpretation of complex identification processes may benefit from
conceptual and ethnographic investigation situated, like these four articles, at
the crossroads between anthropologies that incorporate temporary dimensions of process and power, and histories that seek to include dimensions of
culture and meaning.

Notes
1. Benjamin (1968:255), Marx (1978:595), Roseberry (1991:43).
2. Eloquently entitled "Are there Histories of People Without Europe?"
Talal Asad's (1987) early review of Wolf s immense anthropological world
history promptly reminded us that local histories do not start with their incorporation into capitalism.
3. This is not exclusive of North American academia. In an important
effort to bring a sense of culture into Andean historiography, Alberto Flores
Galindo (1986), one of the most an eminent Peruvian historians, resorted to
a combination of French and British structuralist theories of myth to propose the endurance of what he denominated Utopia Incaica. From my viewpoint, only his unmatchable talent as a historian prevented him from reifying
"Andean culture," as has been the case with other similar attempts. (See, for
example, Burga 1988; Wachtel 1977)
4. For an excellent analysis of how power becomes culturally visible see
Wiener 1995.
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5. Fox (1989) for example.

6. like some articles in Joseph and Nugent (1994).
7. Throughout his article, Todd Little-Siebold qualifies the colonial order
as 'ethnic," or socio-racial. From my viewpoint, this limits his analysis. As he
rightly remarks colonial labels were abundant, and from my perspective irreducible to any modern order, ethnic, racial, or other. Calidadas he also
points outreferred to status, and this was a result of occupation, religion,
gender, income, or education. Caste was not a marker in and of itself as to
indicate someone's social standing it could combine with close, which in turn
was similar to calidad, yet mostly used to refer to individuals of "low" origin.
Neither can be translated as ethnicity or race, without losing its historically
specific meaning (regarding the Andes, see OToole 2001; Graubart 2001).
8. Fanon 1967.
9.About decenda see de la Cadena 2000.

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