A STORY OF ENCOUNTERS, CHANTS AND TERRITORIES
by Patricia Oliart (Newcastle University)
Several years ago, I went to visit my dear friend Maria Elizabeth Lucas in Porto Alegre, where she teaches the anthropology of music at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. There, I had the opportunity to meet an excellent and motivated group of her students, whom I met again a short time later at a meeting of anthropologists in Montevideo. On that occasion, I was able to hear Ivan present his work with the copleras of Amaicha del Valle, which has now materialized in this beautiful and inspiring book.
The book is dedicated to women who sing (which in itself is a gift) and who, with their songs and their work, build their territory and their identity, attentive to their time and to the relationships and challenges of their increasingly complex surroundings. Ivan's consistently reflective writing guides us through the conditions and possibilities that nourished his ethnography and his interpretation of the copleras' practice. Ivan carefully and respectfully reviews the academic production that precedes his on the region and coplero singing in northwest Argentina and, with modesty and creativity, presents the innovative aspects of his work in a clear and enriching way.
The unavoidable issues of cultural, generational and gender differences are discussed in a complex and consistent way throughout the text and her personal work to address the possibilities of communicating and translating ethnographic experience inhabits these differences in a comfortable and honest way, making the topic an opportunity for political reflection on her practices.
The theoretical tools are embedded in a carefully crafted conceptual framework that brings together the accumulated knowledge of the anthropology of music with an active and critical review of recent concepts and debates in the social sciences. And it is in this contemporary and reflexive way of approaching the copleras that the central place of the book is occupied by the process of producing knowledge in collaboration with the singers themselves.
Ivan then offers us the theorizations elaborated by the copleras, their sensoriality and the meaning of their practice in an open and problematized dialogue with his own work of interpreting and organizing their ethnographic records. There is a deliberate political act in listening to and writing about these practices, theorizing with the copleras of Amaicha about the relationship between the emission of the voice and the territory, about the relationship between their bodies, their throats and their surroundings, which include other beings, taking a look at the processes of naming things and then reflecting on the relationship between corporeality, territory, expression and representation.
Through his conversations about singing, ethnographic observation and walking, we learn to understand the ways in which the copleras call themselves according to their interaction or relationship with other peoples, based on their own feelings and understandings. Ivan does the difficult job of capturing the complex web of relationships and interpellations in which the copleras participate and convincingly takes us to the ground, fundamental to contemporary indigenous feminism, which politically links the bodies of indigenous women to their territories.
By reconstructing the instances and places where they sing, we have also learned about what it means to be a calchaquí diaguita as a complex identity that has to negotiate its representations, visibility and recognition with the ways in which the state classifies and frames its cultural expressions, with misunderstandings and mistreatment.
For some decades now, we have been questioning ways of carrying out ethnographic work in which the activity of getting to know different ways of being in the world takes the form of a “translation” from one culture to another. But it is not so easy to integrate this critique into research practice and even less easy to ensure that the writing reflects, in a way that is both transparent and complex, how the processes of co-production of knowledge have a transformative effect, both on the researcher and on those who receive the researcher and decide to collaborate with him.
Ivan's theoretical consistency and intellectual honesty enable this transformative process to be recorded with great skill and in a didactic and generous way, making this exercise one of the book's main contributions. By reflecting on the problems of translation and representation in an open and transparent way in the research and writing process, Ivan allows us to see how he makes decisions in his interpretation, positioning himself attentively in his affections and the ways in which the relationship with the singers impacts on his thinking and feeling. I can only thank him for this powerful and hopeful combination of attention, presence and generosity in this book.
