Gastón Gordillo
Biographic Data
| ID | 86283 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gastón Gordillo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gastón |
| FAMILY NAME | Gordillo |
| SIGNATURE | GORDILLO G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5292-7121 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 394 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Hostile terrain: On the spatial and affective conditions for revolution
In 1966, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara arrived in south-east Bolivia assuming that the region's forested mountains and the poverty of the peasantry constituted 'favourable terrain' to start a revolution. Instead, he encountered a hostile terrain that led to the defeat of his guerrilla force and to his death. In this article, I offer a spatial and affective analysis of Guevara's conceptualizations of 'favourable' and 'unfavourable' terrain, of his gendere…
The power of terrain: The affective materiality of planet Earth in the age of revolution
This commentary analyzes Stuart Elden’s contributions to a theory of terrain and proposes to further politicize them through a bodily, materialist, and non-anthropocentric examination of the severity of the climate crisis and of the ways in which grassroots movements struggling for radical change are empowered by their engagement with terrain. In particular, I argue in dialogue with Elden that this perspective requires an affective and non-Euroce…
Se viene el malón. Las geografías afectivas del racismo argentino
Este trabajo analiza las dimensiones espaciales y afectivas de la blanquitud y del racismo en la Argentina por medio de un contrapunto entre "la Argentina Blanca", entendida como el proyecto de crear una geografía nacional de tipo europeo, y "el malón" como alegoría de las multitudes populares que amenazan dicho proyecto. A partir de una lectura espacial y afectiva de momentos clave de la historia argentina desde fines del siglo XIX hasta el gobi…
Terrain as insurgent weapon: An affective geometry of warfare in the mountains of Afghanistan
The luminescence of rubble
On the destructive production of food: Some lessons from South America
This essay offers some general reflections on the destructive dimensions of corporatized forms of food production in contemporary South America. The dialectic of production and destruction that has long defined capitalism has too often been figured as "creative destruction", a phrase that can make the negative social and environmental impact of food commodity production seem to be something acceptable and even positive. The authors who contribute…
The savage outside of White Argentina
In early December 2013, several urban centers in Argentina experienced a wave of turmoil that brought to light the sensibilities that have historically racialized the national geography – a racialization whose existence has long been denied by Argentine official discourse. In the province of Córdoba, thousands of police officers demanded a salary increase by withdrawing from the streets and remaining in their barracks, while undercover officers i…
Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina
This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and lite…
Bringing a place in ruins back to life
Empire on Trial: The Forensic Appearance of Truth
Anthropology and Post-Neoliberal Horizons in Argentina: Promises and Limits
Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction
At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the s…
Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River
In this article, I examine the debris that modernist projects leave in space and the ways in which these vestiges are interpreted, generations later, by people haunted by the long-term reverberations of their ruination. Drawing on theories of negativity, I look at local memories woven around these spatial sedimentations with the aim of examining the interpenetration of space, history, decline, and subjectivity. My narrative focuses on the remains…
Longing for Elsewhere: Guaraní Reterritorializations
In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemete…
Places and Academic Disputes: The Argentine Gran Chaco
This chapter contains sections titled: The Chaco at the Turn of the 20th Century The Making and Unmaking of Savagery: The Early Days of Chaco Ethnography Institutionalization and the Challenges of “Social Change” History, Power, and Resistance: The De-exoticization of the Chaco The Mythical Savage: The Rise and Fall of Phenomenological Ethnology Bórmida's Ghost: Chaco Scholarship in the Mid and Late 1980s Conclusion Note References
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in Northern Argentina's Gran Chaco Region
The clientelization of ethnicity: Party Hegemony and Indigenous Political Subjectivities
The crucible of citizenship: ID-paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state's military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery …
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
El colonialismo y los límites del relativismo: Comentarios sobre "la cuestión colonial" de Annick Lempériére
Annick Lempériére nos advierte atinadamente sobre la reificación de conceptos a menudo utilizados como modelos pre-armados antes que como categorías históricas. En forma general, su llamado de atención sobre los riegos de la utilización mecánica del mote “colonial” a los más diversos escenarios y momentos, sin una adecuada contextualización histórica, me parece acertada. No obstante, Lempériére oscila entre esta advertencia (del todo entendible) …
Landscapes of devils tensions of place and memory in the Argentinean Chaco: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Shamanic Forms of Resistance in the Argentinean Chaco A Political Economy
El objetivo de este artículo es realizar un análisis comparative) de la inscriptión de prácticas shamánicas en los campos de lucha y en la economía política del Chaco argentino. Basándome en fuentes históricas y etnográficas y en mi propio trabajo de campo entre los tobas occidentals, analizo cómo los shamanes han sido actores políticos involucrados en cambiantes formas de confrontación asociadas a diferentes momentos históricos. Sostengo que los…
Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence
Shamanic Forms of Resistance in the Argentinean Chaco A Political Economy
The crucible of citizenship: ID-paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state's military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery …
Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction
At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the s…
Terrain as insurgent weapon: An affective geometry of warfare in the mountains of Afghanistan
Landscapes of devils tensions of place and memory in the Argentinean Chaco: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River
In this article, I examine the debris that modernist projects leave in space and the ways in which these vestiges are interpreted, generations later, by people haunted by the long-term reverberations of their ruination. Drawing on theories of negativity, I look at local memories woven around these spatial sedimentations with the aim of examining the interpenetration of space, history, decline, and subjectivity. My narrative focuses on the remains…
The Breath of the Devils: Memories and Places of an Experience of Terror
In this article, I examine how an indigenous group of the Argentine Chaco remembers experiences of exploitation and terror in terms of devil imageries and how, in turn, these memories shape their current senses of place. My analysis focuses on the Toba of the mid-Pilcomayo River and their memories of work in a sugar plantation in northwestern Argentina. These narratives hinge on different types of devils and cannibals that made the plantation a p…
Longing for Elsewhere: Guaraní Reterritorializations
In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemete…
The power of terrain: The affective materiality of planet Earth in the age of revolution
This commentary analyzes Stuart Elden’s contributions to a theory of terrain and proposes to further politicize them through a bodily, materialist, and non-anthropocentric examination of the severity of the climate crisis and of the ways in which grassroots movements struggling for radical change are empowered by their engagement with terrain. In particular, I argue in dialogue with Elden that this perspective requires an affective and non-Euroce…
Locations of Hegemony: The Making of Places in the Toba's Struggle for La Comuna, 1989-99
In this article, I examine how hegemonic fields and the forms of contention they generate are active forces in the production of places. I focus my analysis on an indigenousgroupof the Argentinean Chaco, theTobaof the Pilcomayo River, and their recent struggles to gain control over the municipality of the region, locally known as la comuna. I examine how these struggles reproduce and simultaneously contest forms of state hegemony and, in so doing…
The Dialectic of Estrangement: Memory and the Production of Places of Wealth and Poverty in the Argentinean Chaco
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Después de los ingenios: La mecanización de la zafra saltojujeña y sus efectos sobre los indígenas del Chaco Centro-Occidental
Hostile terrain: On the spatial and affective conditions for revolution
In 1966, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara arrived in south-east Bolivia assuming that the region's forested mountains and the poverty of the peasantry constituted 'favourable terrain' to start a revolution. Instead, he encountered a hostile terrain that led to the defeat of his guerrilla force and to his death. In this article, I offer a spatial and affective analysis of Guevara's conceptualizations of 'favourable' and 'unfavourable' terrain, of his gendere…
Se viene el malón. Las geografías afectivas del racismo argentino
Este trabajo analiza las dimensiones espaciales y afectivas de la blanquitud y del racismo en la Argentina por medio de un contrapunto entre "la Argentina Blanca", entendida como el proyecto de crear una geografía nacional de tipo europeo, y "el malón" como alegoría de las multitudes populares que amenazan dicho proyecto. A partir de una lectura espacial y afectiva de momentos clave de la historia argentina desde fines del siglo XIX hasta el gobi…
The clientelization of ethnicity: Party Hegemony and Indigenous Political Subjectivities
Un Río tan salvaje e indómito como el indio toba: Una historia antropológica de la frontera del Pilcomayo
The luminescence of rubble
Empire on Trial: The Forensic Appearance of Truth
El colonialismo y los límites del relativismo: Comentarios sobre "la cuestión colonial" de Annick Lempériére
Annick Lempériére nos advierte atinadamente sobre la reificación de conceptos a menudo utilizados como modelos pre-armados antes que como categorías históricas. En forma general, su llamado de atención sobre los riegos de la utilización mecánica del mote “colonial” a los más diversos escenarios y momentos, sin una adecuada contextualización histórica, me parece acertada. No obstante, Lempériére oscila entre esta advertencia (del todo entendible) …
On the destructive production of food: Some lessons from South America
This essay offers some general reflections on the destructive dimensions of corporatized forms of food production in contemporary South America. The dialectic of production and destruction that has long defined capitalism has too often been figured as "creative destruction", a phrase that can make the negative social and environmental impact of food commodity production seem to be something acceptable and even positive. The authors who contribute…
Después de los ingenios: La mecanización de la zafra saltojujeña y sus efectos sobre los indígenas del Chaco Centro-Occidental
Un Río tan salvaje e indómito como el indio toba: Una historia antropológica de la frontera del Pilcomayo
The Dialectic of Estrangement: Memory and the Production of Places of Wealth and Poverty in the Argentinean Chaco
The Breath of the Devils: Memories and Places of an Experience of Terror
In this article, I examine how an indigenous group of the Argentine Chaco remembers experiences of exploitation and terror in terms of devil imageries and how, in turn, these memories shape their current senses of place. My analysis focuses on the Toba of the mid-Pilcomayo River and their memories of work in a sugar plantation in northwestern Argentina. These narratives hinge on different types of devils and cannibals that made the plantation a p…
Locations of Hegemony: The Making of Places in the Toba's Struggle for La Comuna, 1989-99
In this article, I examine how hegemonic fields and the forms of contention they generate are active forces in the production of places. I focus my analysis on an indigenousgroupof the Argentinean Chaco, theTobaof the Pilcomayo River, and their recent struggles to gain control over the municipality of the region, locally known as la comuna. I examine how these struggles reproduce and simultaneously contest forms of state hegemony and, in so doing…
Shamanic Forms of Resistance in the Argentinean Chaco A Political Economy
El objetivo de este artículo es realizar un análisis comparative) de la inscriptión de prácticas shamánicas en los campos de lucha y en la economía política del Chaco argentino. Basándome en fuentes históricas y etnográficas y en mi propio trabajo de campo entre los tobas occidentals, analizo cómo los shamanes han sido actores políticos involucrados en cambiantes formas de confrontación asociadas a diferentes momentos históricos. Sostengo que los…
Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence
Shamanic Forms of Resistance in the Argentinean Chaco A Political Economy
Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence
Landscapes of devils tensions of place and memory in the Argentinean Chaco: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
El colonialismo y los límites del relativismo: Comentarios sobre "la cuestión colonial" de Annick Lempériére
Annick Lempériére nos advierte atinadamente sobre la reificación de conceptos a menudo utilizados como modelos pre-armados antes que como categorías históricas. En forma general, su llamado de atención sobre los riegos de la utilización mecánica del mote “colonial” a los más diversos escenarios y momentos, sin una adecuada contextualización histórica, me parece acertada. No obstante, Lempériére oscila entre esta advertencia (del todo entendible) …
The crucible of citizenship: ID-paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state's military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery …
Places and Academic Disputes: The Argentine Gran Chaco
This chapter contains sections titled: The Chaco at the Turn of the 20th Century The Making and Unmaking of Savagery: The Early Days of Chaco Ethnography Institutionalization and the Challenges of “Social Change” History, Power, and Resistance: The De-exoticization of the Chaco The Mythical Savage: The Rise and Fall of Phenomenological Ethnology Bórmida's Ghost: Chaco Scholarship in the Mid and Late 1980s Conclusion Note References
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in Northern Argentina's Gran Chaco Region
The clientelization of ethnicity: Party Hegemony and Indigenous Political Subjectivities
Ships Stranded in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River
In this article, I examine the debris that modernist projects leave in space and the ways in which these vestiges are interpreted, generations later, by people haunted by the long-term reverberations of their ruination. Drawing on theories of negativity, I look at local memories woven around these spatial sedimentations with the aim of examining the interpenetration of space, history, decline, and subjectivity. My narrative focuses on the remains…
Longing for Elsewhere: Guaraní Reterritorializations
In September 2003, dozens of Guaraní families from the town of Hipólito Yrigoyen in northwest Argentina decided to take back La Loma, the forested hill that stands at the edge of town and from where they had been expelled decades earlier by the San Martín del Tabacal sugar plantation. On the verge of a cliff from where they could see the town and behind it the sugarcane fields, men, women, and children began clearing a space near their old cemete…
Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction
At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the s…
Bringing a place in ruins back to life
Empire on Trial: The Forensic Appearance of Truth
Anthropology and Post-Neoliberal Horizons in Argentina: Promises and Limits
The savage outside of White Argentina
In early December 2013, several urban centers in Argentina experienced a wave of turmoil that brought to light the sensibilities that have historically racialized the national geography – a racialization whose existence has long been denied by Argentine official discourse. In the province of Córdoba, thousands of police officers demanded a salary increase by withdrawing from the streets and remaining in their barracks, while undercover officers i…
Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina
This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and lite…
Political science (19 works) · Indigenous Cultures and History (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Geography (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Humanities (9 works)