Fernando Coronil (1944-2011)

On August 16, 2011, anthropologist and historian Fernando Coronil died of lung cancer after a four-month struggle that he insisted on referring to not as a battle, but as a dance. At his side throughout that dance was his partner of 46 years, Julie Skurski, as well as their daughters, Mariana and Andrea Coronil. Coronil was a distinguished professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a position he assumed in 2008 after teaching for two decades at the University of Michigan, where he had served as director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. First in Ann Arbor, and then in New York, several generations of students — myself included — found him to be a constant source of guidance and inspiration.Fernando Coronil was born in Caracas, the son of Fernando Rubén Coronil and Lya Imber de Coronil, both of them medical doctors of national and international renown. After completing undergraduate studies at Stanford University (where Coronil met Julie Skurski), Coronil and Skurski pursued doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Their fieldwork in Cuba was interrupted when the Nixon administration blacklisted Coronil for reasons that have never been specified, preventing him from returning to the United States for several years. The experience kindled keen interests in the mysteries, (ir)rationalities, and powers of the state, which would remain central concerns of Coronil’s work in the future. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski returned to Venezuela, where Coronil embarked on fieldwork that would focus on the politics and history of Venezuela’s state, and its modernizing schemes for national development based upon turning petroleum revenues to collective purpose. Such concerns would be central to Coronil’s masterful study, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 1997). They would remain foci of the study he was working to complete at the time of his death, “Crude Matters”: a study of the Hugo Chávez, the 2002 coup against him, and the implications of Chávez’s project for the future of the left in Latin America.Throughout his career Fernando Coronil was deeply committed to Venezuela, not only as a scholar but also as a citizen who remained present and involved in his patria throughout his life, though he was always the first to argue that Venezuela, like all places, could never be understood merely as a world unto itself, but only as a place dynamically related to — in fact, coproduced with — a wider world of social relations, whether those were organized under the aegis of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, or globalization. Coronil’s scholarship is too diverse, too engaged on too many fronts, to sum up in a few words. Some might note his early challenges to dependency theory and other formalistic accounts of exchange, to insist that history, and political struggle, be restored to the heart of political economy. Others might delve into the rich insights of Coronil’s discussion of the state, whether in terms of its complex role mediating national or regional social life and the makings of capitalism at the global level, or in terms of the state’s makings — and with it, the making and remaking of “the people” — as an ongoing, constructed, and ever contested performance, one marked and marred by what Coronil and Skurski called the “hidden violence of postmodern empires.” We might single out Coronil’s brilliant engagement with the topic of subalternity, one that sought to transcend the polar opposition between dominator and dominated, or between unified, modern subjects and dispersed and fragmented postmodern subjects, to argue for a non-essentialist conception of subalternity, one based upon a “relational concept of social agency” that could extend, at moments, to encompass even the state itself, and in the process offered the possibility, and challenge, of what Fernando called “listening to the subaltern.” Or we might focus on his work on the politics of geohistorical categories, whether in his work on Fernando Ortiz’s “counterfetishism,” or, especially, in his brilliant critique of Occidentalism as what Coronil called a “dark side” of Orientalism, and one founded not just upon Eurocentric practices of representation but upon global and asymmetrical relations of power and exploitation.At the core of such diverse contributions was a more fundamental goal: that of integrating the analysis of political economy with that of culture. In this task, Fernando Coronil had constant recourse to historical analysis, and in the process made his most important contributions to history. As he wrote in The Magical State: “Building on a long tradition of critical reflection on colonialism and imperialism and taking the postmodern emphasis on the fragmentary as a useful moment in a holistic and relational analysis, I have argued for the need to recast Occidentalist histories which assume a sharp separation between the West and its periphery. . . . [T]he theoretical recognition of the centrality of nature in the historical formation of capitalism,” he continued, allows us to “view modernity as a relational process involving the contrapuntal constitution of subaltern and Occidentalist modernities” and to “open a space for exploring the actions and potential solidarities of heterogeneous actors formed within increasingly interrelated material and cultural conditions.”Fernando drew inspiration from many sources — art, music, literature, philosophy, soccer, the sea — but perhaps from none so much as the work of Jorge Luis Borges. He was particularly fond of citing Borges’s evocative discussions of labyrinths within labyrinths. In Fernando’s hands, though, a metaphor for an inescapable maze was inverted and transformed into a metaphor for anthro-history, and perhaps life, as an unending series of openings and possibilities. In refusal of a closure that is as cruel as it is premature, I cite Fernando, and his imaginings of a “labyrinth whose exits become entrances to an expanding labyrinth . . . its arrivals . . . points of departure and its answers pos[ing] new questions.”

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Dance · Latin Americans · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Visual arts · Cultural and political discourse analysis · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America