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Summer
2001
BRAZIL Returning
to Brazil this past summer to complete my field research on the above
book was the most fulfilling since I embarked on the project in the
summer of 1998 for many reasons. I am deeply grateful to the Stone Center for this generous
award. First, I was able to visit and interview writers and cultural
producers in Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Sul--regional
parts of Brazil that I have never been.
Secondly, I acquired rare materials in books, photocopies and
tapes that will enhance my analysis of already selected texts.
Thirdly, I was able to discover and compare peculiarities of each
region in terms of its local color, history, traditions, and overall
culture that are essential for my critical analysis.
Finally, I returned briefly to São Paulo, Rio, and Bahia to meet
with figures such as Clóvis Moura, Abdias do Nascimento and Vovô in
order to clarify some of my theoretical questions. The
implications of this field research are multiple.
Firstly, the twelve-chapter book project is now a reality.
Aside from the four chapters already written, of which one has
been published by Studies in Latin
American Popular Culture 20 (2001: 231-245), and the other is
forthcoming from Research in African Literatures later in the fall, I envisage that
the remaining eight chapters will be written in the next couple of
years. It would be
particularly rewarding if I could spend the next two summers on
exclusive writing without traveling. I now have most of the materials I
need to focus on writing. In
view of the topic and the question of market, I have also started having
discussions with university presses and their responses so far have been
encouraging. This is not a
traditional project on textual analysis but an interdisciplinary book on
Afro-Brazilians which combines history, sociology, popular culture,
theater with film in order to capture the essences of a marginalized
group within the mythology of "racial democracy." When
completed, Afro-Brazilian
Literature: A Question of Color, Class, and Culture, will fill a gap
in Afro-Brazilian cultural scholarship and go on to put Afro-Brazilians
on the map as they have not been recognized before.
This, at least, is my modest hope and conviction. COSTA RICA Maureen
Shea I
spent the summer researching and writing most of the first chapter of my
book project entitled "Voices from the Caldera:
Central American Women Writers' Assault on Official
History." I focused on
Costa Rican writer Tatiana Lobo's first novel, Asalto al paraíso, an
immensely rich text which challenges the officially recorded colonial
history of the region of
Talamanca, Costa Rica. In
September I presented a well-received paper at the Latin American
Studies Association meetings in Washington D.C. based on my work this
summer. I have completed
most of the writing for the first chapter of my book on Tatiana Lobo;
I hope that during the semester lulls I can finish the section on
her second novel, Calypso, so that, during the summer of 2002 and my
sabbatical leave which follows in the fall semester, I will be able to
work on the next chapters of my third manuscript.
I have applied for an NEH grant for the spring semester of 2003;
if successful, I will extend my sabbatical from one semester to a
year and will be able to complete the manuscript.
I am grateful to the Stone Center for its support of this
project. The following is a
synopsis of the writing accomplished this summer. Costa
Rican writer Tatiana Lobo's Asalto al paraiso
portrays how the scriptural world of the Europeans violently
imposes itself on an ancient oral tradition, establishing the domination
of the foreigners over an officially muzzled Indoamerican population.
The novel is based on the historic rebellion of the Indians of
Talamanca from 1694-1709. Official
Spanish documents of the time describe the tragic deaths of the
Franciscan fathers Pedro de Rebullida
and Antonio Zamora, ten soldiers, and the wife of one of them at the
hands of the "barbarian Indians".
But little mention is made of the centuries old accretion of
abuses that the Spanish heaped on the Talamanca Indians that culminated
in this explosion of violence, nor of the cruel torture and enslavement
of the Indians immediately before, during and after the rebellion.
Tatiana Lobo offers an alternative interpretation of the events
through the muted voices of the Indians, thereby revealing the much
broader tragic dimensions of a silenced history.
The protagonist, a Spanish scribe, gradually comes to understand
that, as an instrument of Spanish government officials, he has
participated in the destruction of an oral culture that has become his
paradisiacal refuge. Through various creative literary techniques and rhetorical devices Lobo demonstrates that the razing of the American paradise not only signified the enslavement and death of countless Amerindians and Africans, but also the imposition of the European languages, their history and their memory over and above that of the oral cultures of the native Americans and kidnapped Africans, using alphabetic writing as a key weapon and in that way sealing the complicity between letters and history. Lobo takes it upon herself to demolish the illusion of alphabetic writing as a civilizing "state of grace" five hundred years after the publication of the Gramática de la lengua castellana by Antonio Nebrija in 1492 establishing the basis for a superior, written Castilian language ( see Walter Mignolo's, The Darker Side of the Renaissance) . The author also assaults the collective Costa Rican imaginary which represents itself as an equitable, homogenous society that did not have to confront ethnic or racial miscegenation causing so many conflicts in its neighboring Central American countries. Lobo shows that official written history was used to suffocate the recording of the collective memory of the indigenous and Africans, attempting to erase their identity and creating a fictitious base for a homogenous, racially white culture of European roots. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Brian
Potter During summer 2001, the Stone Center funded Mary Casey Kane to help me research two projects central to my interests and important in the study of international relations of Latin American countries. Since I needed assistance in collecting and initially analyzing data, I was pleased that the Center chose Casey as my research assistant. Casey’s own work is data-centered and she continues to work towards improving her statistical skills. Creating and formatting data sets is at times both tedious and unpredictable, as one must respond to what information is available and strive to mold it into a usable format. I was very pleased not only with Casey’s skills, but her diligence and adaptability in responding to the changing demands of my research on the international politics of Eastern Tropical Pacific tuna fisheries and popular support for market-based reforms in Latin America. Changes in the US$3 billion/year Eastern Tropical Pacific tuna industry portend international conflict and ecological collapse. The stakeholders’ willingness to compromise on an international accord depends on economic and political conditions within each country. To assess the likelihood of an agreement that would prevent international conflict and degradation of the resource, Casey gathered data from a number of sources on prices of inputs and products for the industry, the number and strength of interest groups and an array of biological measures of the sustainability of the fishery and harm to dolphin populations. Additionally, she provided contact information of political and industry leaders in several countries. I am currently working with this substantial amount of information to produce an article for Latin American Politics and Society. The second data set Casey collected will attempt to answer the puzzle of why Latin American states embarked on widespread market reform despite opposition from almost every important political actor. The implementation of structural adjustment, privatization and liberal foreign economic policy demonstrates a historical shift from the protectionist and state-directed Import Substituting Industrialization policies of the past. While the new policies may make economic sense, political analysts have yet to assemble a convincing explanation of why politicians adopted the policies in the face of tremendous opposition. Casey contributed pubic opinion data on changing values and preferences within Latin America that will identify, among key groups, sources of support for market reforms. I hope to use the data in a single-authored book that explains the importance of the reforms, reviews the literature explaining their adoption and finally models and tests how members of certain societal groups changed their core political values and strategically pushed the reform agenda through political institutions. MEXICO Elizabeth
H. Boone Guides
for Living: The Religious and Divinatory Codices of Aztec Mexico
is a major synthetic treatment of an important genre of Mexican
pictorial codices, a genre that includes almanacs used by calendar
priests to interpret calendric and cosmic forces, as well as ceremonials
or protocols that prescribe ritual action.
In Mesoamerica, everything that happened and everything that
mattered was influenced and bound together by time, as structured within
a calendrically based divinatory system. The painted screenfold books
that recorded this system were thus the physical foundation for
understanding the future and knowing how and when to act.
These books were the manuals and the recorded guides for correct
living. My
study locates the codices and the practice of divination socially within
Aztec culture. It analyzes
and explains their content and establishes the structural principles for
organizing this information visually, seeking to find the canon for
Mexican divinatory codices. The
study also has the larger mission to recognize these pictorial codices
as manifestations of a non-phonetic, image-based system of
communication, one where meaning is conveyed not by words but by images,
lines, and colors and by their relative spatial arrangement.
In this respect, it contributes to our understanding of visual
communication. Chapters on the social practice of divination and the calendar priests, on the graphic vocabulary of the codices, and on the organization structure of almanacs were finished prior to the summer. During the summer research period I completed the long and very difficult chapter on the almanacs themselves, as well as the chapter on the ritual protocols and much of the introduction. These parts form the core of the book, for they identify the many kinds of almanacs (both general purpose and topical) and protocols and explain how they operate as information systems. Some kinds of almanacs appear in most of the extant codices and can thus be considered standard features, whereas other almanacs and protocols appear only occasionally and thereby signal that a manuscript may be targeted to one realm of society or another. The all-important diagrams and drawings for these chapters were also drafted. Robert
McKee Irwin This
trip to Mexico allowed me to tie up loose ends regarding my manuscript.
As a result, I was able to complete my revisions on time.
According to my editor, Richard Morrison, of the University of
Minnesota Press, my manuscript is scheduled to move into copy editing
within the next month, and if all goes according to schedule, the book
will be out next fall. This
summer in Mexico, I was able to get a hold of several newly published
items that need to be included in my bibliography, most notably Carlos
Monsiváis’s eagerly awaited biography of Salvador Novo, and Héctor
Domínguez’s La modernida
Abyecta. La formacion del discurso homosexual en Latinoamerica.
I was able to meet with Carlos Monsiváis who advised me on how
to go about selling a translation of my manuscript in Mexico, as well as
with Gabriela Cano, Professor of History at the Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana-Ixtapalapa, whose work on gender, transvestism and the
Mexican revolution has also enhanced my manuscript.
I also consulted sources on prostitution and criminology from the
very early 1900s in the National Library including Luis Lara y Pardo’s
La prostitución en México
and Carlos Roumagnac’s Crímenes
sexuales y pasionales. Finally,
I obtained a copy of a book I had been looking for for several years,
the 1952 Spanish translation of Donald Webster Cory’s El
homosexual en Norteamérica. Finally,
I made a side trip to Guanajuato to consult the State Archives where I
reviewed historical information relating to the revolution. I also spent a good deal of time researching the possibility of obtaining illustrations for the manuscript. I visited several museums, and spoke with administrative personnel at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Art in Mexico City who informed me that obtaining the rights to use and reproducing works of art from their collections would cost me anywhere from $150 to $300 per item. I also made a trip to Mérida to visit the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán where the photography collection of the Guerra studios is housed. Again I discovered that the costs of obtaining the rights to reproduce the works I had hoped to include in my book are prohibitive for me. In the end, I decided that it would be best to include only several Posada images (and possibly one by Julio Ruelas) that I have previously worked with and that are in public domain. While the results of this investigation were ultimately disappointing, I now know what will be involved should I choose to seek reproduction rights of visual images in Mexico in the future, as well as how to go about getting them at major Mexican museum and university collections. PANAMA
AND WASHINGTON, D.C. My
Stone Center sponsored research in Panama during the summer of 2001
followed upon my first brief trip to Panama in the preceding summer of
2000, when I visited with a group of Tulane faculty and administrators
to attend a gathering of Tulane’s Panamanian alumni. My initial
encounter with Panama, particularly with the cities of Panama and Colon,
was conclusive—I knew there was exciting work for me to do
there. As an
urban historian (trained as an art historian) teaching in Tulane’s
School of Architecture, I was immediately drawn to the special situation
of Panama City and Colon—at the Pacific and Atlantic entrances to the
Panama Canal respectively—during the historical moment when thousands
of acres of land within the Canal Zone, which were formerly controlled
by the U. S. government, reverted to Panamanian control and were
available for development. During the spring semester of 2001, with the
support of the Stone Center and the School of Architecture, I invited
three Panamanian architects and urban planners to New Orleans to lecture
at Tulane and to engage in dialogue about possible shared programs of
research and application for faculty and students alike. In August I
returned to Panama and met again with these colleagues who generously
shared their knowledge of the urban opportunities and challenges that
face Panama, showing me key urban districts and introducing me to
numerous Panamanians who are involved in crafting the urban future of
the nation. My
summer 2001 research followed two paths, which both overlapped and
diverged: (1) toward developing a multi-disciplinary summer study abroad
program in Panama that would be centered at the Ciudad del Saber (City
of Knowledge) and (2) toward an investigative project of my own focused
on the built communities of the Canal Zone, particularly those of the U.
S. administrative period beginning in 1903, which succeeded the French.
In Panama, I stayed at Fort Clayton, the former U. S. Army base adjacent
to the canal’s Miraflores Locks, where the newly formed Ciudad del
Saber is authorized to accommodate and facilitate national and
international academic programs and business enterprises (the latter
clustered in the “technopark”) that make use of Fort Clayton’s
facilities. Residing
in a duplex at Clayton not only gave me the opportunity to evaluate
potential strategies for housing Tulane students there, but also
provided me with the chance to explore repeatedly and photograph
thoroughly the largest of the U. S. canal installations. I also
investigated and undertook photographic campaigns in other nearby
communities associated with the administration of the canal: Fort Amador—on
the peninsula formed of conjoined islands that protects the Pacific
entrance to the canal; Albrook—the U. S. Air Force base adjacent to
Clayton; Balboa—where the canal’s impressive Beaux Arts headquarters
building (1915) was sited and where docks and terminals received,
stored, and shipped goods in transit; Quarry Heights above Balboa—where
the canal’s chief administrators resided; Gamboa—where the canal
construction workers were housed; and Paraiso—home to the canal’s
Afro-Caribbean workers (the last two communities were sited near the
Pedro Miguel Locks). Taken together, these installations represent
remarkable urban strategies for creating self-sufficient communities
that functioned independently and jointly to provide spaces of work,
residence, education, health care, and leisure for the canal’s
employees and administrators. Moreover, they embody a legacy of
environmentally sensitive architectural and landscape design for a hot
and humid climate in an ecologically rich tropical zone understood to be
unique in its biodiversity. My research on these communities will focus
on their historical urban significance, as well as on the challenge that
they present for adaptive reuse within the context of contemporary
economic conditions and scientific understanding of the crucial nature
of the canal’s watershed area in which they were built. In
Panama, I also investigated the documentary legacy of the U. S.
administration of the Canal Zone, which survives in the collections of
the former Canal Zone Library (today the Centro de Recursos Técnicos).
I learned, however, that this institution today houses primarily copies
of original materials, the latter having been returned to Washington in
preparation for the reversion of the Canal Zone. Therefore, after my
return to the U. S., I extended my explorations relative to these
documents at the Library of Congress and the National Archives. In my
scholarly career, exhibitions have often been the outcomes of my
research, and, for this reason, original materials—photographs, maps,
architectural and landscape drawings, models, correspondence—provide
important foundations for my work. Since the centennial of Panamanian
independence occurs in 2003, I am deliberating the possibility of
organizing an international exhibition around my research.
Administrators of the University of Panama with whom I met, including
the Rector and the Director of National Studies, said that they would
lend institutional support to an exhibition proposal. In addition, my
interest in this goal is underscored by the fact that colleagues in
Panama have recently organized to discuss founding a museum dedicated to
the history of the city. Another of the outcomes of my research sojourn in Panama was the collaborative preparation under the Stone Center’s auspices of a Fulbright application for a short-term faculty seminar entitled “Ecology, Community Planning, and Social Challenges in Panama” to be conducted in the summer of 2002. Prominent among the objectives of the seminar will be the preparation of faculty to teach a multi-disciplinary summer program, which we plan to initiate in 2003. My particular area of focus within the proposed program will relate to historical urban research and attendant museological and archival issues, as well as to contemporary developmental planning, not only for the Canal Zone communities, but also for the historic districts of Colón, Panamá La Vieja (the earliest extant settlement of Panama, destroyed in 1671), and the Casco Antiguo (the settlement that replaced Panamá La Vieja). The Stone Center grant awarded me for summer 2001 stimulated these exciting plans by enabling critical contacts with institutional leaders in Panama, such as the directors of the Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá and the Patronato Panama Viejo. P ERULeslie
Snider Background This
project builds on an earlier psychosocial assessment of victims of
violence in Peru's fifteen year Shining Path Civil War.
The objective is to translate psychosocial research into
multidisciplinary, community-based psychosocial programs through fully
understanding the impact of terror, social disruption and loss in the
local context.
To ensure cultural relevancy, this project is a collaboration
between Tulane University, Universidad de Huamanga in Ayacucho, local
governmental and non-governmental organizations, rural villagers,
community health workers and indigenous healers. The
original assessment revealed an alarming incidence of traumatic events
and post-traumatic sequelae among villagers in Ayacucho Department,
hardest hit by
fighting and human rights abuses.
We proposed expanding the original assessment by including
information about substance abuse, youth and domestic violence, and
community coping strategies, resiliency, priorities and healing methods.
We also proposed a formal psychosocial intervention developing
community-based mental health programs, community development
strategies, and collaboration between local entities. Site
Visit and Activities Dr.
Johnson and Dr. Snider traveled to Peru both for this project and to
teach a course in Pisaq for Tulane University public health students
entitled "Traditional Healing in the Andes."
Due to unforeseen circumstances (two earthquakes in the region,
and ill health of one of our students in the course), we had to delay
our departure to Ayacucho.
There has been a change recently in scheduled flights to Ayacucho,
with only one airline operating only a couple days a week.
Therefore, our original itinerary was impossible, and we were
able to spend just two days with our Peruvian colleagues on this
project. Despite
this change in plans, we did manage to accomplish a great deal in
furthering this project in terms of vision and design of our next steps.
We met with Dr. Juan Jose Trujillo, PhD, and Edith Huallyasco
Marquina, R.N., who have worked with this project since its inception.
Dr. Trujillo has left his position with the municipal government
and is currently working for CARE, Peru.
In that position, he has been promoting the idea of psychosocial
programming and attention to mental health issues.
Ms. Huallyasco has furthered her own work in psychosocial issues
based on the training she received from us in this project on mental
health and trauma concepts, and psychosocial research methodology.
She is currently a lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de San
Cristobal de Huamanga for the school of social work in mental health and
trauma.
She has also trained fellow nurses working in the field, and
together they have formed a mental health research group.
This group continues not only to expand our original assessment
to other regions in the Peruvian Andes, but has also investigated the
broader issue of basic mental health care needs in an area with almost
no mental health services. During
this visit, we outlined a strategy to develop our formal psychosocial
intervention based on the wealth of data already collected about the
needs of the population.
The plan is focused around the establishment of an Institute of
Mental Health for the Region of Ayacucho.
The Institute will have three objectives:
mental health research, education and training in mental health
and trauma, and execution of psychosocial projects in communities.
Dr. Trujillo and Ms. Huayllasco have begun the process of forming
support for the initiative, including identifying some funding sources,
and potential collaborators and professional staff.
As a first step, we plan to create a board "Mesa de Salud
Mental" which will coordinate mental health programming and funding
in the region between various governmental and non-governmental
organizations, including:
The
Institute itself will be a collaborative initiative between Tulane
University and Peruvian colleagues.
Tulane University will provide technical assistance and mental
health and trauma training to mental health researchers and
practitioners in the region.
Tulane will draw upon existing expertise within our own network,
including adult and child psychiatrists from the Department of
Psychiatry and Neurology, social work colleagues at the School of Social
Work and research specialists from the School of Public Health and
Tropical Medicine.
Formal courses and seminars will be organized at the Universidad
Nacional de Huamanga in mental health disease and treatments, trauma
training, psychosocial programming and qualitative research design.
Courses will be given to social work, nursing and public health
students, in addition to special training for primary care physicians
and nurses in the area to raise competency in mental health care
delivery.
Dr. Johnson serves as associate residency training director in
the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, and will help to arrange for
residents to volunteer their time to training and supervision for
colleague in Peru during their fourth year of residency. The
team also met with various professionals from the community and
university who are interested to collaborate on this project, and may
potentially be hired by the Institute.
These include a local psychiatrist in the area from Holland who
has designed community-based mental health programs in Europe (she is
currently not practicing psychiatry, but is very interested in our
proposal), and various professors interested in incorporating
traditional healing methods in the psychosocial interventions.
Additionally, the researchers have formed a strong relationship
with Dr. Fernando Cabieses who was a guest lecturer in the summer course
in traditional healing.
Dr. Cabieses is founder of the Traditional Medicine Institute in
Peru, and also founder of a university which includes a medical school
in Lima.
He has offered to assist with technical expertise from his own
university, and to provide links with our Institute.
The Institute will examine opportunities for inclusion and
legitimization of traditional healing methods as a means of recovery of
values and cultural traditions in the healing from trauma.
Future Plans and Presentations Drs. Snider and Johnson also plan to use the Institute site and activities as potential field sites for public health and social work students to conduct capstone and research activities, and for educational exchange between the universities. The Peru team is currently exploring local options for funding and have identified several sources that would fund specific initiatives and programs in the community. The Tulane team is currently exploring funding for inter-university collaborations and general Institue funding. Ms. Huallyasco is scheduled to join the Tulane team for a presentation this December of our work in Ayacucho at the annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in New Orleans. At that time, we will formalize the draft proposal for funding and inter-university collaboration. Of
note, we are presenting both a poster and workshop presentation on the
Psychosocial Assessment of Victims of Violence in the Peruvian Andes,
and will also provide opportunities for Ms. Huallyasco to speak about
her work to Tulane University uptown and downtown campuses. |
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STONE CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES |
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Please report updates to Valerie McGinley Marshall |
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