Say it, Foucault!

...(H)e has his truth and (his) homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to (him). Is it this ritual and these values which...can be traced through the whole of Western culture?

I feel like this sometimes.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Quote of a hot hot hot day*

*Not actually related to the weather.

"To understand the extent, reality, and sacred nature of the rights of the person without destroying society, without fracturing it to atoms: such is the most difficult social goal."

-Alexander Herzen, quoted by Tzvetan Todorov in "The Conquest of the America: The Question of the Other"

Quote of the day

"We need to rigorously explore the ways our interventions as 'white people saving brown people from slightly less- brown people' may maintain colonialist- style relations, may blind us to difference among these people and are integral to consolidating a subject-position as gringa."
A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, Diane Nelson


Damn straight. I (and probably every NGO ever) totally needed someone to remind me of this. To deconstruct the anthrobabble, she's arguing that the act of intervening is how foreigners in Latin America consolidate our identity in that context aka "gringa"

Revisiting 3rd Grade History

"But this victory from which we all derive, Europeans and Americans both, delivers as well a terrible blow to our capacity to feel in harmony with the world, to belong to a preestablished order; its effect is to repress man's communication with the world, to produce the illusion that all communication is interhuman communication; the silence of the gods weighs upon the camp of the Europeans as much as on that of the Indians. By winning on one side, the Europeans lost on the other; by imposing their superiority on the entire country, they destroyed their own capacity to integrate themselves into the world."

Tzvetan Todorov "The Conquest of the Americas and the Question of the Other"

I came across this AMAZING quote while I was working on my midterm for Globalization. I'm starting to grow quite fond of the class: it's wonderful to approach history as a question rather than an answer. Why did things have to happen as they did and could they had been envisioned differently?

Weekly Round Up: Quotables

"It's all about balance"
-Random hipstery guy at Market Basket, after overhearing me and my housemate debate whether more salt or more sugar was desirable in our tomato sauce.

"I always sleep so soundly when I'm in Sierra Leone"
-My advisor, in a quick chat we had about readjustment to life in the US and the stress that our constant multi-tasking here creates.

"Sepamos Combatir/Por Nuestro Honor/Nuestra libertad"/“Let us know how to fight for our honor and our liberty”
-Mural, Villa Victoria, a housing project in Boston's South End that is an example of community organization in the face of urban gentrification projects. Visited with some friends before going on a random and improvised culinary tour which included Peruvian, Ethiopian and Chinese food.

"They eat the flesh of their enemies, not because it is good, but because it is established custom"
-Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed around the world with Magellan, from a primary source document describing his travels and the peoples he met. Most of whom are described as either crazy or naked or both.

"To date, states have been far more effective in the destruction of housing than its construction"
-Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, a scathing look at the city in the modern era

October 11: ¿Por qué Cristóbal Colón no pudo descubrir a España?

Feliz Día de La Raza, known in the states as Happy Colombus Day!
Today's title is a very good (and humorously intentioned) question posed by poet Pablo Neruda in his "Libro de las preguntas"/ Book of Questions. "Why couldn't Colombus discover Spain?"
Upside of being sick: I had time to sit around and read poetry and books.
Downside of being sick: I didn't make it to any of the anti-Colombus Day activities on the Alameda as I had planned which I'm sure would have been really interesting. Eventually I'll get around to witnessing a proper protest march...