Ships Stranded in the Forest

Debris of Progress on a Phantom River

Bibliographic Data

ID2222253
AuthorsGastón Gordillo (0000-0001-5292-7121, University of British Columbia, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume52
Issue2
Pages141-167
Publication date2011-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/658909
OpenAlexW45005505
LanguageEN
Citations received24
References cited59

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 of steamships that the attempts to turn the Bermejo River into a commercial fluvial route left around the town of Rivadavia in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina. In the 1860s and 1870s, businessmen and officials hailed the navigation of Bermejo as a project that would bring progress and prosperity to a savage region under the control of indigenous groups. Shortly thereafter, the Bermejo shifted its course, the navigation schemes collapsed, and Rivadavia entered a period of decline from which it never fully recovered. In this article, I examine how local views of the debris of ships and of a monument erected to commemorate them evoke multiple absences, chief among them that of the progress that the ships were expected to bring to the Chaco

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Geography · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Period (music · Political science · Prosperity · Subjectivity · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Maritime Security and History · Philosophy

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