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This is Democracy – Collective Trauma

In this week’s episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Stephen Sonnenberg, MD, to discuss how collective trauma can affect people, groups, and societies.

Steve Sonnenberg, MD, is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and medical humanities and ethics scholar. At The University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School he serves as professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. He is also fellow in the Paul Woodruff Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Studies and chair of the faculty panel of the Bridging Disciplines Program “Patients, Practitioners, and Cultures of Care,” both in the University’s Undergraduate College. The Bridging Disciplines Program is designed to prepare healthcare undergraduates with the tools they will need later, as providers, to create a healthcare system where health is a human right and structural disparities in care are eliminated.

This is Democracy – Evangelicals Today

In this week’s episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Dr. Daniel Hummel about the history of American Evangelicalism and its connection to both policy and theology.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “If Your God is a God of Truth.”

Dr. Daniel Hummel is the Director for University Engagement at Upper House, a Christian study center serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. Daniel has written about religion, politics, and foreign policy for the Washington Post, Christianity Today, and Religion News Service. His academic research has been published in Religion & American Culture and Church History.

This is Democracy – Bush v Gore: The Legacy.

In this week’s episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Sanford Levinson to discuss the 2000 election, the Supreme Court decision that finalized it, and how this decision has had ramifications throughout modern history.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “The Court Has Stopped the Count”

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals–and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization. He has also written six books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2d edition 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century (2015); and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and teh Flaws that Affect Us Today (forthcoming, September 2017). Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2015, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought (2016); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006); and The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

This is Democracy – The Ukraine War

In this week’s episode, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Michael Kimmage to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled “For a War of Worlds.”

Dr. Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund and chair of the Advisory Council for the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. From 2014 to 2017, Kimmage served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He publishes widely on international affairs, U.S.-Russian relations, and American diplomatic history. Dr. Kimmage is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (2009); In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (2012); The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (2020). His forthcoming book is Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (2024).

Review of Bolivia in the Age of Gas (2020) by Bret Gustafson

Bolivia in the Age of Gas by Bret Gustafson offers an analysis of debates on the political struggles over natural gas and the ways in which the management of this resource radically transformed Bolivia´s national politics. The book is a long-lasting history that begins in the 1930s with the extraction and commercialization of fossil fuels and takes the reader through turning point events like Evo Morales’s presidency in 2006, the construction of the gaseous state, and the reasons for its fall. Gustafson examines how the structural adjustment programs implemented by Bolivian middle-class elites in agreement with the United States created an economic model that only benefited a certain group of people. This can be perceived by how neoliberal political projects created by multinational corporations resulted in in state violence, repression, forced labor, and a political and economic sovereignty in which citizens depended on global policies and capital flows.

The author begins by showing how the Bolivian-Paraguay War of the 1930s, known in Bolivian history as the Chaco War, was mutually favorable for the Standard Oil Company in Bolivia and for the United States. This event began a history of extraction and commercialization of fossil fuels in the country. At the same time, this war demonstrated how the Bolivian state prioritized the life of certain citizens over others by sending indigenous people from the country’s lowlands to the front lines. In the following chapters, the author explores the nationalization of natural resources under what he calls the “Gaseous State” and the emergence of MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) as a political party under the leadership of Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president.

Chaco War combatants. (From left to right) Hugo Ballivián, David Toro, Gabriel Gosálvez, Enrique Peñaranda, Enrique Baldivieso, Ángel Rodríguez, and Germán Busch.
Ballivián, Toro, Peñaranda, and Busch would later become Bolivia’s presidents.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In his final chapters, Gustafson presents a moment of excess, waste, and the fall of the “Gaseous State.” This book not only presents the development of the “Gaseous State” but also a history of the United States imperialism and the consequences of the relationship between the two countries. The reader can see how gas in Bolivia becomes a transnational geopolitical concept that affects political decisions and reinforces racial tensions. A very important aspect shown in the text is that Evo Morales represented a change in Bolivia, as he was from the highlands and not the lowlands, where most of the deep-rooted questions of exclusion and racism took place. This made him a key strategic figure between middle- and high-class elites, the United States, and indigenous people.

Evo Morales, Bolivia's president from 2006 to 2019 — *Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president from 2006 to 2019. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

The book sets up an important dialogue between historical and anthropological sources. The text could be considered a historical ethnography that could benefit both fields of research. It combines a deep history of Bolivia’s natural resources with ethnographic fieldwork. It is important to mention that the author has been working with indigenous movements in Bolivia for over thirty years. This book reflects the friendship and commitment he has developed with the Guarani and how he has been able to observe both sides of the story as an author from the United States.

Another element that accompanies the text and allows the reader to engage easily is photography. The images reflect key moments of the book and, at the same time, allow the reader to have a visual journey of the changes in neoliberal politics and commercial development in Bolivia. Also, the author constantly mentions the figure of Evo Morales and his connection with Bolivian racial tensions and gender violence. In terms of gender violence, although the author intends to portray and approach certain moments of Bolivian history with a gender perspective, the depth in which he addresses the topic is shallow and confusing and does not add to the narrative. The way in which gender is portrayed allows the reader to see that Bolivia is a sexist country in which women suffer distinctive violence regarding their sexuality, morals, and daily life practices. Still, the text does not permit the reader to fully grasp the dimensions, the layers, and the complex intersectionality between class, race, and gender and how this affects different women in Bolivia.

*Bolivian women, 1911. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Bolivia in the Age of Gas asks readers to be critical and pose questions about political projects, international relations, and racial and social inequality. It is interesting to see how the author produces a narrative through the lens of the natural gas industry. This makes the book an interesting and innovative analysis and permits the reader to pose deep critical questions about social changes through the management of natural resources. Although the book is in English, the author explains a range of concepts in Spanish and provides the reader with a dictionary of key terms and abbreviations used in the book. This could be interpreted both as an academic and a political decision that positions Bolivia in the Age of Gas as a critical and necessary text for academia and an excellent read for someone trying to grasp and understand the history of the current changes happening in Latin America. It allows several disciplines to begin to observe critical problems through lenses like natural resources, contemporary problems in geopolitical dimensions, and the role of the United States in the neoliberal politics of Latin American countries.

Maria Mercedes Gómez was born in Bogota, Colombia. She is an MA fellow student of Latin American Studies at UT Austin. Her work centers around the recognition of victims and minorities in Latin American democracies, with special emphasis on Colombia and Mexico.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), by Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi’s magnum opus, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, is a transformative work that transcends traditional scholarship to provide a profound examination of the roots and manifestations of racism in the United States. Published at a critical juncture in history–marked by both symbolic progress and persistent racial challenges–Kendi’s groundbreaking narrative dissects the historical development of racist ideas. As the nation grappled with the paradox of having its first African American president during the final years of Barack Obama‘s presidency, the book emerged against a backdrop of heightened awareness of racial injustice, debates about Confederate symbols, and the rise of white nationalist ideologies. Ibram X. Kendi’s exploration of the historical roots of racism provided a timely lens through which to understand and address contemporary racial issues during this pivotal period. In addition, it offers an invaluable lens through which contemporary policymakers can confront and dismantle systemic inequities. As a historian and scholar of race and discrimination in America, Kendi takes readers through the annals of American history and reveals the insidious evolution of racist ideologies from their inception to the present day.

*Black Lives Matter protest signs on the ground, Washington, DC, 2020.*
*Source: Library of Congress*

At its core, Kendi’s work challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the roots of systemic racism. While the prevailing perspective often centers on individual attitudes and actions as the primary drivers of racial disparities, Kendi posits that racist ideas have historically been intertwined with policies. Thus, Kendi challenges simplistic categorizations and encourages a more comprehensive understanding of the historical development of racist ideologies. The essence of Kendi’s work lies in its commitment to truth-telling. He urges readers to acknowledge the historical context that has fueled the persistence of discriminatory policies, encouraging a paradigm shift from mere acknowledgment to proactive dismantling. Stamped from the Beginning is not merely a historical scholarship; it is a call to action that prompts policymakers to scrutinize their beliefs and assumptions, fostering a critical examination of the systems they construct and maintain.

Kendi’s theory shifts the conventional paradigm in the discourse on racism. He argues that racism is not solely a product of individual attitudes but is deeply embedded in the policies and structures of society. Kendi’s comprehensive exploration revolves around the lives and beliefs of five key historical figures representing different periods in American history. These figures, including Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis, offer a spectrum of perspectives on race, illustrating the multifaceted nature of racism and how it became ingrained in societal structures and policies. By doing so, Kendi challenges the prevailing notion that racism is merely a collection of isolated incidents or prejudiced beliefs. Considering racism’s persistence, Kendi suggests shifting our focus toward policies and institutional structures. The book also challenges the binary framework that often separates individuals into “racist” or “not racist” categories. Kendi proposes a spectrum of racism, introducing the terms “segregationist,” “assimilationist,” and “antiracist” to describe different approaches and beliefs regarding race. This nuanced framework encourages readers to reflect on their own positions on this spectrum and consider the broader implications of their ideas within the context of systemic change.

Free Angels David poster, 1971 — *Free Angela David poster, 1971.*
*Source: Library of Congress*

The book’s relevance extends beyond historical analysis, making it an essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the ongoing struggle against racism in the United States. Stamped from the Beginning emerged at a critical period in American history during the latter years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Published in 2016, the book entered the literary scene amid a nation grappling with the paradox of celebrating its first African American president while confronting enduring racial inequality. Kendi’s work engaged with contemporary challenges and provided historical context to elucidate their origins, becoming a crucial resource for those seeking to comprehend the historical racial injustice continuum underpinning present-day struggles.

Stamped from the Beginning is exceptionally accessible, employing a narrative style that makes it understandable to a diverse audience. Kendi sidesteps unnecessary jargon, ensuring that the material remains open to different readers. The book’s rigorous approach and original research draw on various primary and secondary sources, contributing to new insights into understanding racist ideas and their policy impact through a historical rhetorical analysis of speeches and correspondences. While the use of Kendi’s specific individual case studies–Mather, Jefferson, Garrison, Du Bois, and Angela Davis–provides powerful case studies and allows for a nuanced exploration of racism, I argue that this approach is limiting.

The concern here is that by centering the narrative primarily on the lives and beliefs of specific individuals, the book risks overlooking or underemphasizing broader collective societal attitudes and actions. Racism is not solely the product of a few influential individuals but is often deeply ingrained in the structures and norms of a society. A more expansive examination of collective forces, social movements, and systemic influences would provide a more holistic understanding of how racist ideas permeate and persist in society. I argue that if Kendi explored the influence of institutions, cultural norms, and widespread attitudes alongside individual narratives, he could have provided a more complete picture of the complex interplay between racism and society, which is one of the main arguments he makes throughout the book.

*African American demonstrators outside the White House, protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, 3.12.1965.*
*Source: Library of Congress*

While the book effectively demonstrates how individual actions contribute to the perpetuation of racist ideologies, it may leave some readers wanting a more comprehensive analysis of the broader societal context in which these individuals operate. Exploring the influence of institutions, cultural norms, and widespread attitudes alongside individual narratives could provide a more complete picture of the complex interplay between racism and society. While the book successfully highlights the role of specific historical figures in shaping racist ideas, a broader examination of the social and institutional forces that contribute to the perpetuation of racism could enhance the reader’s understanding. Regardless, Stamped from the Beginning is a beacon in public policy literature, accessible and engaging yet deeply rooted in original research. It introduces a transformative theory that prioritizes policies in the fight against racism, challenges conventional paradigms, and encourages further exploration within the field. As a result, the book becomes a pivotal cornerstone in reshaping the discourse on race. It should be considered a canonical work in public policy for its transformative potential and paradigm-shifting insights.

Maddie (Williams) Shorman is a doctoral student in the LBJ School for Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral research focuses on the transnational networks of religious nationalism. She is currently using network and content analysis to map church-state relations regarding views on violence from the pre-Constantine times to the modern era.

The Weight Around My Neck

Pick up the camera. Aim, kneel, shoot. He hides behind a pair of rough hands. Inscribed in the knuckles: “Lupita.” Another shot followed by instant regret. Somehow, taking that photograph reminded you of the power dynamics—the violence—immersed in the asymmetrical act of representing others. Let the camera hang around your neck again. It never felt heavier. Engage. You are told only half of the story, maybe because of fear, or maybe you don’t deserve it yet. He walks away just as you take one last picture. The scar on his back might know the other side of the story.

The scar is a large tattoo of Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint of death. Canonized by no one yet a saint still, Santa Muerte pulls together a wide range of devotees across Mexico and among Mexican immigrants in Queens, New York. They ask her to help them with legal troubles, protection from the police, health issues, and love affairs. Arely, a transgender woman from Tlapa, Guerrero, is the leader of the movement in New York. She introduced me to many devotees who generously shared their stories with me.

M took off his shirt to show me his Santa Muerte tattoo. — *M took off his shirt to show me his Santa Muerte tattoo (Queens, New York).*

The results of those conversations turned into my first book, El pasado que me espera: bosquejo de etnografía cinemática,[The Past that Awaits Me: A Sketch toward Cinematic Ethnography] where I try to tell these stories without bending them, to avoid privileging the frame over the content. More than showing what I learned, the book reads like a constant struggle about what to do with these stories, who they are serving, and how to write them. Investigating the politics of representing the asymmetry between researcher and researched, between writer and believer, became the book’s core and of all my subsequent work.

The book explores the politics and poetics of ethnographic representation and the troubles of writing about others and picturing them. And it offers a possible escape: to incorporate my photographic practice into the research and bend the writing as much as the ethnographic experience demands it, to use the conventions of cinematic discourse (moving the camera, montage, cuts, close-ups) that diminish the “effect of the real” without discarding its narrative power. Drawing on two years of fieldwork on Santa Muerte—a Mexican folk saint usually described as the patron saint of the Drug Wars in Mexico—I essay across genres to avoid the exoticizing, one-sided descriptions that frame its devotees as criminals, sicarios, or deviants. It exploits the diversity of this devotion and the violence inherent in reducing it to a narco-saint.

El pasado que me espera is divided into three parts. Part I, the book’s core, is an experiment in ethnographic writing that borrows techniques from cinematic discourse, photography, and archives to offer a portrait of the diverse devotion to Santa Muerte: a polyphonic, multi-sited ethnography. Yet, written as a pastiche or collage, it sometimes reads like a novel based on extensive fieldwork, challenging many of the conventions of more traditional ethnographic narratives.

Parts II and III can be considered appendices separated from the empirical text. Part II offers an essay explaining how religious practices and beliefs are represented in Santa Muerte studies and other works on popular religions. It traces how “religion” and its “persistence” came to be conceived as research problems in the social sciences, which makes the appearance of functionalist arguments almost inescapable: devotees believe because they are poor, ignorant, or because they live in violent worlds. Anchoring the text in my fieldwork on Santa Muerte in the context of the rise of the New Atheism movements and social anxieties of modernity, the chapter takes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s method seriously to give agency and meaning back to religious beliefs: to describe, instead of explaining.

Santa Muerte giant statue that watches over Templo Mayor (Tultitlán, Estado de México) — *Santa Muerte’s giant statue that watches over Templo Mayor (Tultitlán, Estado de México).*

Part III delves into the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing and representation. Using the history of photography and its ambiguous connections to cinematography as a parallel, it unveils the violence and mediation inherent to any form of representing otherness. By showing how academic writing borrows conventions of photography—frame, focus, first and second plane, depth, presence—it then proposes to keep borrowing, but from cinematography—montage, lending the camera, “subjective shots,” cutting—to give ethnographic writing the experience of the real while at the same time underscoring its fictitious foundations.

How the text came to be at all warrants an explanation. It all started as a traditional project in ethnography: to embark on a qualitative study to examine and transcribe the life of people who had something in common: believing in Santa Muerte. To understand their beliefs and try to articulate them, I attended baptisms, weddings, Sunday mass, and occasional parties. But this approach soon fell apart and turned into something else: a hybrid, polyphonic text, with the argument lying somewhere between the content and the form. Without a clear path, a pastiche of essays, book reviews, urban reportage, history, auto-ethnography, and loose ends escaped my fingertips. Something got in the way, but what exactly that thing was remained unclear. On the one hand, the text reflects my inability to reduce what I witnessed in the field into a linear ethnographic report, an unwillingness to betray the stories so they could fit a frame. On the other, it reveals the weight I was carrying around my neck. Literally, the weight of the camera.

*J borrows my camera and shoots back (Zumpango, Estado de México)*

Fieldworkers generally carry their cameras without giving them too much thought.[1] As an innocuous recording device, the camera serves as a backup memory and to assert presence: an evidence-making machine. Some even echo Margaret Mead, one of the most prominent and controversial anthropologists of the twentieth century, who thought that the perfect ethnographic record would be something close to a film camera standing on a tripod in the corner of a room: infallible, unaltered, scientific.^[2] Others follow the methods of Bronislaw Malinowski, another very prominent and complicated anthropologist, who used the camera with foresight and care to build an archive of fieldwork itself to assert his presence in the field. He appears constantly in his clearly posed field photographs to convey the hardships, loneliness, and remoteness that serious anthropological work entails. Ethnographic photography seeks to strike a delicate balance to convince its viewers the anthropologist was there without altering the scene to create ghosts.[3]

Yet photographs usually exceed their maker’s intentions. As James Clifford noted in his essay “On Ethnographic Authority,” one of the subjects in Malinowski’s photograph “A Ceremonial Act of the Kula” is looking back at the camera. At first, the picture works as a metaphor for presence but soon begins to diminish its own authority. The illusion of the photograph’s “subjective view” asserts the presence in the scene and brings the viewer to the field: You are there because I was there.^[4] But the illusion is broken by that inconvenient stare. When anthropological subjects look back at the camera, they break the spell. They destabilize the infallibility of the camera, and the illusion fades—which may explain why portraits fit so uncomfortably into the ethnographic look.

Doña Petra and her grandchildren holding tiny Santa Muerte statuettes (Zumpango,
Estado de México).

I took the camera everywhere while doing fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 in Mexico City, Boston, and Queens. A 1984 Olympics Edition Canon AE-1 film camera loaded with 100 ISO color 35mm film. Each film had 36 exposures, which makes photographers on a budget think twice before pressing the shutter every time. After 4 or five rolls, my disappointment with the pictures was only matched by my disappointment with the writing. They mirrored each other: impersonal, distant, disengaged. Vague descriptions of religious rituals in my notebooks matched photographs of devotees from behind perfectly. Shy students, it turned out, make bad ethnographers. That became crystal clear. Were bad photographs another sign? Can the camera speak? Overcoming this crisis entailed weaving photographs and words, writing and picturing—a process that became central to my eventual book.

*A commercial for the 1984 Olympics Edition Canon AE-1 film camera.*

Changing my photographic practice derailed my writing completely. To improve the images, I had to come closer, move differently, make the quotidian strange, and explain the presence of the camera. Photography exacts constant engagement and attention to detail. The images looked different because my body was moving differently. To make a portrait, the operator needs to build a relationship with the subject, articulate the reasons behind the documentary impulse, and accept the trade-off it implies: to reveal their intentions. A portrait is the snapshot of a conversation; it is always the trace of an encounter, a visual dialogue where no side can remain silent. And my first distanced, impersonal photographs of devotees did not lie: I was too afraid to talk.

Conversations triggered by the camera yielded better ethnographic insights. The excuse of a picture gave me an easy entry to casual small talk, tattoo stories, and revealing insecurities. Encounters that would grow into more delicate dialogues. The Canon became my badge and amulet. I wore the strap like a uniform. But it also became a threatening presence. Some people refused to be photographed, and others dismissed camera-bearers as untrustworthy outsiders and remained silent. Portraits rarely come without strings attached: Where will you publish these? Will you send me a copy? How do I look? What do you want it for? It soon became clear: the politics of ethnography and photography overlapped, and that intersection was what the project became about.

Maritza, the owner of a chicken store in Zumpango, poses with her personal statuette. A
Virgen de Guadalupe guards a door that leads to her private Santa Muerte altar. — *Maritza, the owner of a chicken store in Zumpango,*
*poses with her personal statuette.*
*A Virgen de Guadalupe guards a door that leads to her private Santa Muerte altar.*

El pasado que me espera navigates the intersection, embracing complexity and incompleteness. Its fragmented narrative seeks to evoke the tension immersed in visual methods: exposure time, focus, frame, close-ups, composition, and cuts. Moving the camera, lending it, making it stay still, allowing it to think—and letting the portraits speak for themselves. Yet against my best intentions, the writing never relieved the weight of the camera. It feels as heavy and intrusive as the first day, but the neck pain remains instructive. I still carry it as an amulet, a marker of how indebted I am to these stories, and as a reminder that not only does getting closer yield sharper images and more intimate portraits: it is a responsibility.

*All the photos in this piece are by the author.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. In 2023 he was awarded the Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship in Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum, where he will be working on his research project: “Covarrubias’ Crossings: Art, Science, and the Global Politics of Ethnographic Image-Making.” Rodrigo’s work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. He traces the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing.

[1] I use the term “fieldworkers,” widely used in anthropology, to include ethnographers, artists, photographers, and other disciplines that go “to the field” without being scholars or trained anthropologists.

^[2] “For God’s Sake, Margaret, Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead,” The CoEvolution Quarterly 10 (1976).

[3] See Terence Wright, “The Fieldwork Photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and the Beginnings of Modern Anthropology,” JASO 22 (1991), pp. 41-58; Michael W. Young, Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography, 1915-1918 Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998.

^[4] James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988. See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983.

Review of The Age of Dissent: Revolution and the Power of Communication in Chile (2023), by Martín Bowen

Martín Bowen’s most recent book, The Age of Dissent: Revolution and the Power of Communication in Chile, explores the turbulent period between 1780 and 1833 in which the inhabitants of the Captaincy General of Chile, a sparsely populated Spanish colony on South America’s Pacific Coast, witnessed an unprecedented scale of political experimentation and mobilization. Beginning in 1780, a series of plots, revolts, and a brutal civil war initiated in 1816 culminated in the collapse of Spanish rule and the emergence of Chile as an independent republic. In this context, women, artisans, indigenous, and free and enslaved peoples of African descent participated in the emergence of a pluralistic political landscape in which radical political dissension became an inescapable part of politics.

Drawing from archival repositories in Chile, Argentina, and Spain, The Age of Dissent skillfully uses newspapers, congressional debates, court cases, travel accounts, and material culture such as badges, flags, portraits, and other insignia to interrogate the ways in which Chileans from different social backgrounds experienced and participated in the desacralization of royal authority and the opening of politics. The book’s central claim is that this process was marked in large part by the emergence of radical political dissent and the appearance of new mediators in the political sphere. Bowen points out that while a diversity of opinions existed before the monarchical crisis, Chileans started to question the sacred foundations of royal power in this period by publicly expressing dissenting ideas about the legitimacy of the king and his agents.

The definition of radical political dissent used in the book is broad and incorporates a series of practices used by different actors to express disagreement either with the foundations of the ancient regime’s political power or with the ideas of republicanism. Thus, the realms of communication and visibility became the prime means to express radical political dissent. Dressing, iconoclasm, and rumor, alongside other written and discursive practices, were used by patriots and royalists alike to achieve their political goals.

The Age of Dissent is divided into two parts and eight thematically organized chapters. The first part explores how visibility became a realm of political action in Chile during the monarchical crisis. According to Bowen, insignia such as badges, clothes, and portraits were meant to manifest the transcendent origin of the political power of the monarch and his agents. However, after 1808 using the same insignia could potentially become a medium to express radical political dissent. For instance, chapter two analyzes the contested meaning of clothing during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. Clothing, broadly defined to include hats, canes, and capes, represented the “natural” social hierarchies of the ancient regime societies. In Chile, sumptuary clothing was reserved for the elites, and popular was banned from their use. Nonetheless, patriots inverted the meaning of clothing by using hats or ragged clothing as republican symbols. Similarly, chapter four demonstrates how acts of iconoclasm, for instance, the destruction of portraits of King Ferdinand VII, were used to transgress the traditional boundaries of political participation.

*King Ferdinand VII and Queen Maria Christina of Spain and their hats. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

The book’s second part is concerned with what Bowen defines as the “field of propagation”. In these chapters, Bowen reconstructs in great detail how, during the Age of Revolutions, Chileans believed that actions and behaviors, vices and virtues, could easily propagate throughout the social body via imitation and contagion. In this context, the elite’s behavior was thought to influence popular classes. Chapter Five explores how patriots invented new models of heroism during the Revolutionary period to destabilize traditional conceptualizations of heroism and loyalism. Following a similar line, chapter six explores how certain political ideas were thought to be vectors of contagion and how political actors in Chile used different forms of communication to spread dissenting ideas.

Notably, the book develops a rich conceptual frame to understand political action during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. Categories of analyses such as “mimesis,” “publicness,” and “contagion” allow Bowen to capture the period’s social and political language, serving as an explanatory framework to understand how actors made sense of their actions. Furthermore, The Age of Dissent skillfully shows the complexity of the political landscape of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Chile, avoiding overly simplistic characterizations of the political actors. For instance, it shows that radical political dissent could be present within the same political factions.

"Chile's First National Congress," oil painting by Nicanor González Méndez, 1903. — “Chile’s First National Congress,” oil painting by Nicanor González Méndez, 1903.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Another important historiographical contribution is that the book places Chile in the wider context of Atlantic revolutionary politics. Often characterized as a backwater of the Spanish empire sheltered from the political agitation of the period, Bowen shows that Chileans were in close contact with revolutionary developments in the Atlantic World via the circulation of people and information. Bowen further stresses this point by analyzing a series of vignettes intertwined within the chapters of the book, such as the official celebration of US independence in Santiago on the fourth of July of 1812 or the arrival of Fernando Condorcanqui, the eldest son of Túpac Amaru II, to the port of Talcahuano in 1784.

The Age of Dissent is a welcomed contribution that adds to recent studies on popular politics, the public sphere, and the crisis of colonial rule in Spanish America. Furthermore, it expands our understanding of how communication and visibility became important tools that Chileans used to shape the transition from colony to republic. Nonetheless, the book lacks a detailed explanation of the origins of political dissent. Why did some political actors choose to side with the royalists or patriots? Did elements such as geography, literacy, or class shape this process of self-identification? Overall, The Age of Dissent’s captivating narrative and creative use of primary sources make it a compelling reading not only for scholars of Chile but also for anyone interested in the Age of Revolutions.

Juan Sebastián Macías earned a BA in History from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and an MA in Latino/a and Latin American Studies from the University of Connecticut. Currently, he is a first-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include indigenous history and popular politics in the Northern Andes during the Age of Revolutions.

IHS Discussion: “Cosmology of Early Buddhism – A Mobile Hierarchy” by Xinru Liu, College of New Jersey

In her talk “Cosmology of Early Buddhism – A Mobile Hierarchy,” Dr. Xinru Liu discussed her book Early Buddhist Society: The World of Gautama Buddha (SUNY Press, 2022; and Permanent Black/Ashoka University, 2022), a richly scholarly yet accessible and imaginative account of society in the time of the Buddha. What might daily life have been like in India in the time of the Buddha? Who were some of the rulers, monks, philosophers, devotees, and doctors with whom the Buddha would have interacted and had discussions? What was involved in spreading the message of Buddhism and setting up the Buddhist sangha (order)? What were the schisms and factions, and what was the nature of opposition to Buddhism from Brahmin hegemony?

A great deal is known about Buddhist tenets and doctrine, but very little exists on the lived context of the Buddha himself. Early Buddhist texts in Pali reveal a society in ways that other texts relating to Buddhism, as well as Brahmanical literature, do not. Xinru Liu reads this literature, along with the earliest Buddhist artworks on stupas, to argue that the historical Buddha does not really exist in the imagination of most people, including Buddhists. In this book, she sets out to plug this gap in our understanding of Buddhism, illuminating and eliminating many misconceptions along the way. Gender, religion, and caste in early India come alive in this richly scholarly yet accessible and imaginative account of society in the time of the Buddha. This is a book for students, teachers, and everyone interested in the living universe of India 2500 years ago.

Click the book cover to watch the full discussion.

Dr. Liu, Professor Emeritus at the College of New Jersey, is a scholar and teacher of early Indian history and world history.

This is Democracy – Middle East in the 1970s and Today

This week, Jeremi and Zachary are joined by Professor Salim Yaqub to discuss how the 1970s changed the Middle East, and how those changes are still relevant in the modern day.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem entitled, “To Israel, a Widow.”

Salim Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of three books: Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He has also written several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.

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