Cultural Rhythmics: Applied Anthropology and Global Development from Latin America 1803828242, 9781803828244

Citation preview

CULTURAL RHYTHMICS

To Davydd Greenwood, for his constant support in translating my ideas and bringing this book to fruition. To Viviana Montibeller, for her vitality, strength and love.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

ix

About the Author

xi

Prologue

xiii

Acknowledgements

xvii

Introduction

1

1. Temporality and Spatiality

5

2. Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

19

3. Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

39

4. Design of Development Agendas

93

References

119

Index

131

vii

LIST OF FIGURES 1 Figure 1. 2 Figure 2. 3 Figure 3. Figure Figure Figure Figure 4 Figure Figure

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Figure 10. Figure 11.

Constitutive Temporalities of Current Hegemonic Temporality. Composition of Cultural Rhythmics. Analysis Matrix of Social Imaginaries About Cultural Heritage. Heritage Intervention Model. Analysis Matrix of Social Imaginaries About Rural Tourism. Analysis Matrix of Social Imaginaries About Agriculture. Scientific Imaginaries of Anticipation. STOB Conceptual Diagram. STOB Graphic to Represent a Symmetrical Past Future Flow of Time. STOB Characterization for Designing Agendas. Analysis Matrix of the ‘Energy Transition’ Problematic.

ix

8 27

42 50 54 69 85 94 96 98 109

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gonzalo Iparraguirre is a Doctor in Anthropology (2015) and Licentiate in Anthropological Sciences (2010) from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. His work focuses on comprehending and translating temporalities, development imaginaries and their political interventions. He completed international postgraduate courses and training at the University of Bern, Switzerland (2013); at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil (2015); at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic (2018); at ECLAC-United Nations, Chile (2018); and at the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway (2019). He has more than 20 scientific productions corresponding to various disciplines (anthropology, archeology, heritage management, tourism, future studies). He has participated in more than 30 scientific and political outreach events. He has carried out consultancies and technical assistance to private and public organizations on various topics (development, agenda planning, management, cultural impact). He is a postgraduate and graduate professor, and collaborates as postgraduate researcher for the Culturalia group (University of Buenos Aires), the ADETER group, the IIESS-CONICET (South National University), and the CEDETS group (Southwest Provincial University). During the last 15 years he has worked in the design, management and application of public policies at different levels of public agencies in Argentina, such as: provincial government (2008–2010), national government (2010–2015) and municipal government (since 2016) where he is a public official as Secretary of Development of the Municipality of Tornquist, Province of Buenos Aires. As a consultant in Anthropology of Development, he has worked on regional, provincial and national projects. Some of the activities carried out were: identification and modeling of territorial problems; historical analysis of development planning in Argentina; comparative analysis of public policies around the development and design of territorial agendas; fieldwork to set up sociocultural baselines for infrastructure projects with anthropological impact. xi

xii

About the Author

He is the author of the Anthropology of Time online course (www. academia.edu/learn/GonzaloIparraguirre).

PROLOGUE

It is my pleasure to introduce this work by an outstanding young Argentinian anthropologist, Gonzalo Iparraguirre, who has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires and is currently the Secretary for Development of the Municipality of Tornquist in the Province of Buenos Aires. We have become colleagues despite the distance in both age and geography through the mediation of the internet. Having read my work, Gonzalo contacted me and we began a series of exchanges and videoconferences that convinced me that the issues he addressed and his unique combination of experiences tell a story of theory, method and ethnographic context that will be of broad interest to a transdisciplinary audience including anthropologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, policymakers and philosophers. Iparraguirre’s training is both broad and deep. On the path to his PhD in Anthropology and thereafter, he has delved into cultural geography, the Frankfurt School, Cultural Studies, Bourdieu and Foucault. This combination creates fertile ground for anchoring ethnographic engagements in a much broader set of issues. He is exceptionally good and agile in managing and communicating these perspectives, and he joins the ranks of other anthropologists like Paul Rabinow (1996) and Hiro Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg (2017) in synthesizing these kinds of perspectives in a uniquely ethnographic way. What makes him unique is that all of this academic background is leavened by year of experience as a public official in a municipal development agency. He is an academic and a practitioner who has worked out a way of conceptualizing what he learns daily in his administrative work as grist for his anthropological thinking. And then the return trip he makes involves bringing his academic learning to bear on improving the work of his agency. Unlike ¨ Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner (1983) who is an accomplished practitioner but cannot formulate in more abstract terms how he does what he does, Iparraguirre tacks back and forth between theory and practice effortlessly. He does so in a way that enriches both and shows us how both a PhD level of training and years of administrative experience can be made to speak to one another effectively. xiii

xiv

Prologue

Iparraguirre anchors the present work in a practical and grounded focus on the processes of patrimonialization, community development and internal colonialism. It is based on years of fieldwork and on his experiences in current employment as a local development civil servant in a smallish city in Argentina. Unlike many who focus on these subjects, often telling mainly applied case histories, his approach is undergirded with sophisticated readings from a variety of philosophical traditions, a blending of an amalgam of diverse social theories and systems theory. This culminates in the novel idea of cultural rhythmics. This notion of rhythmics gathers up generations of insights about the mismatches between local and cosmopolitan cultures, between development agencies and local people, and between different strata of local societies. By rendering their linkages and disconnects in terms of this concept of rhythmics, he moves past well-known but rather shopworn ideas about domination, development and cultural commodification. In their place and without denying them, he produces a more synthetic multi-dimensional view of the complexity of these processes. One of the key dimensions of these rhythmics is anticipation and even hope as components in these processes. This links with the ground-breaking work of Hiro Miyazaki and Swedberg (op cit.) and Anna Tsing (2015) in complicating and enriching our understanding of policy processes and outcomes in more than oversimplified ‘rational choice’ terms. This is more than a show of ingenuity. His way of engaging these issues manages to find in the diversity of stakeholder perceptions and experiences spaces for positive change and for hope. This contrasts solidly with the more dystopian views that dominate these subjects, a dystopian view to which I have also contributed my share of negativity (Greenwood, 2008). Iparraguirre offers us a sense of gritty realism, ethnographic diversity and complexity, but shows us the possibility of some negotiated solutions to the clear conflicts of interest existing between the various groups he analyzes. It is no small feat and is a story that deserves to be widely read. I have also learned through our interactions that he has a lively, playful and ambitious mind, and I am certain that this book is only the first of many good things he will create for us. Davydd J. Greenwood

References Greenwood, D. (2008). Theoretical research, applied research, and action research: The deinstitutionalization of activist research. In C. R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist

Prologue

xv

scholarship. Global, area, and international archive (pp. 319–340). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Miyazaki, H., & Swedberg, R. (Eds.). (2017). The economy of hope. University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved from https://www.upenn.edu/ pennpress/book/15583.html Rabinow, P. (1996). Making PCR: A story of biotechnology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ¨ D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in Schon, action. New York, NY: Basic Books. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who collaborated with me in different ways and contributed to achieve the dream of publishing my first English book. First, I thank Davydd Greenwood for encouraging me to reach this goal since our first talks in 2017 and supporting the idea of translating my writings. To Pablo Wright for his friendship and mentoring in many ways. To Vico Frattini for his permanent support to continue with my research and be an interlocutor of the entire work. To Marcelo Sili for stimulating me and for advising me in many ways. To Viviana Montibeller for helping me and accompanying me to finish this book. I also want to thank other friends and colleagues that helped with this book ´ Ardenghi, H´ector Fazio, Judith Freidenberg, Carolina in any aspect: Sebastian Gonzalez, Alejandro Otamendi, Filip Vostal, Michelle Bastian, Robert Hassan, Lydia Garrido, Diego Golombek, Silvia London, Stella Perez, Roberto Poli, ´ Vigier, Claudio Tesan and Andrea Savoretti. Thanks to Riel Miller, Hernan Marta Junque and Ariadna Guell from the Barcelona Time Use Initiative. Thanks to Fiona Martinez for the revision of the translation and for patience. Tornquist Municipality had given me the constant political context to think and apply my ethnography. I thank Mayor Sergio Bordoni for his support in my academic-political training. My contact with the University of Oslo (UiO) was thanks to Simone Abram. She also received me at Durham University and assisted me to a meeting with the Durham County Council and the Durham Energy Institute (DEI). I also thanks to Vebjorn Bakken for receiving me at UiO. Thanks to Andrew Morrison for his hospitality in the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo. Thanks to Daniel Knight for receiving me at St Andrews; to Francisco Vergara for receiving at London and to Charles Stewart for sharing my talk at UCL.

xvii

xviii

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my three children, Dante, Fausto and Emilia, for their patience, company and infinite love. To my parents Carlos and Mirta for always helping me. Finally, thanks to the Emerald Editorial team for believing in my work and for guiding me until the completion of the book.

INTRODUCTION

This book is an anthropological tool for decision-makers, development practitioners, policy-makers and academics who deal with the well-known limitations of linear models of development. The source is an ethnographic and interpretative study that combines 15 years of fieldwork in public sector management of development programmes with a symbolic analysis of cultural imaginaries and rhythms of life. Analyzing the symbolic dimension of development in Argentina, this study deploys alternative proposals for the political and scientific management of these processes in Latin America. It shows different ways that get beyond current models’ failure, based solely on economics and technology dissemination, to air and reconcile conflicts that repeat failed intervention strategies and problems that have already been understood both academically and practically. It proposes future design strategies useful for business, community leaders, political decision-makers and scientists from all over the world. Based on extensive anthropological research carried out in Argentina (southwest of Buenos Aires Province), four study cases are analyzed (politics, cultural heritage, rural tourism and agricultural production) around these cross-cutting questions: What does the development of a specific territory ‘mean’ in the daily practices of the different social groups that constitute it? How do political and productive actions, centred on conceptions of development that refer mainly to the past (temporalities) affect the present and the actors’ views of the future? How are decision-making and development agendas constructed from a symbolical perspective? Which innovative changes can ‘applied anthropology’ contribute to building a bridge between science and politics? Framed in the field of applied anthropology and development studies (Appadurai, 2015; Escobar, 2012; Eversole, 2018; Garc´ıa Canclini, 2008; Gardner & Lewis, 2015) with an Action-Research pragmatic perspective (Greenwood & Levin, 2006), the book answers these questions by calling attention to a specific set of rhythms of life and imaginaries called cultural rhythmics (Iparraguirre, 2016, 2019, 2021). Cultural rhythmics is a method

1

2

Cultural Rhythmics

for studying temporality, spatiality and rhythms of life. These rhythmics could be compounded by different social rhythms such as political, productive, economic, financial, seasonal, touristic, of management, of organizational change, of development practices among others. Beyond an innovative analysis of the cases presented in the book, this rhythmics perspective can be extrapolated to the practices of development in other territories of Argentina, Latin America and even the Global South (Bourqia & Sili, 2021; Sili, 2019) because the imaginaries of development and their correlated governance practices are part of a colonial matrix of thought. This colonial way of thinking, still persisting under the modernist imaginary of nation state, is a clear instance of how the past becomes present in the systems of government and in social conflicts never dismantled or transcended even actors and situations gave rise to them no longer exist. The book raises the challenge of understanding social rhythms, initially highlighted in Anthropology as central by Mauss (2002) and Boas (1925), and studied also in classic works by Durkheim (1982), Evans-Pritchard (1977), L´evi-Strauss (1993), Hall (1983), and Bourdieu (2007). The book also contributes greatly to philosophical and anthropological studies on time and space (Appadurai, 2015; Bryant & Knight, 2019; Fabian, 2002; Gell, 1992; Knight, 2021; Lefebvre, 2004; May & Thrift, 2001; Torres, 2021), attempting to account for the combination of the two through the notions of temporality and spatiality. The constructed theoretical and methodological framework enables the consolidation of a way of interpreting social dynamics through their imaginaries and rhythms. It is a tool that helps translate culture into rhythmics of culture. Formulated with a scope greater than the addressed cases, it is shown that by studying the imaginaries of a society through its symbolic representations and language, we are able to access the material world that subjects inhabit and transform. The contents of the book are organized in four chapters, here summarized. Chapter 1 summarizes the main reference works on the problem of time and space in philosophy, science and anthropology. Diverse temporalities and spatialities of the world are distinguished to exemplify the hegemonic character of the scientific notions of time and space and their implications when analyzing social and political dynamics. This theoretical framework enables the construction of an anthropological theory of time and space required to perform an ontological analysis of the concept of development among different territories. It is proposed to conceive development as temporality, as a rationalization of the apprehension of time that implies the three tensions of every temporality: past, present and future.

Introduction

3

Chapter 2 introduces the conceptual framework for addressing the articulation of imaginaries, discourses and practices with the rhythmic method constructed for studying the social dynamics of the various cases. Social imaginaries are sets of symbolic representations on ways of thinking and acting of a social group in its daily life. These can be analyzed through matrices that organize these representations into inclusive hierarchical levels. This method was born from the need for achieving a standard of organization of the ethnographic material, allowing comparison of social groups and case studies with each other in order to get a synchronic result out of them. Cultural rhythmics is a method to study temporality, spatiality and rhythms of life. This method systematizes the set of cultural symbolic representations (imaginaries) with the set of everyday rhythms of life (practices) and aims to connect the ‘presence of the past’ (history, family, identity, life trajectory, tradition) with the ‘presence of the future’ (planning, projects of life, dreams, hopes, wishes, utopias, policies, anticipation). Chapter 3 condenses the application of the theoretical and methodological framework to four complementary study cases: heritage, tourism, agriculture and politics. Considering ethnographic examples of the fieldwork carried out during the last 15 years in Argentina, it proposes to articulate social imaginaries with cultural rhythms that dynamize the daily life of social groups. The analysis of cultural rhythms takes place in the simultaneous interpretation of imaginaries, discourses and practices, anchored in categories such as sustainability, production, technology, agriculture, agroecology, land uses, heritage, tourism and others of similar recurrence between the interlocutors. In Chapter 4, the book ends with concrete anthropological proposals for intervention applied to social and technological development. The main considerations of the work are reviewed on the basis of the discussion of the necessary and urgent dialogue between science and politics, between the ethnographic planning of development, the design of agendas and its execution in the territories. The methodologies of interpretation already described are applied to the analysis of the overarching concepts of the work (development, territory, progress, heritage, becoming, time, space) and the results obtained are reviewed in the more general frame of the sociocultural dynamics of territorial development.

1 TEMPORALITY AND SPATIALITY

1.1 TIME AND TEMPORALITY In order to clarify the possible meanings of concepts used frequently in daily life, such as temporality and time, it is necessary to establish a thorough distinction between both of them, which is vital to comprehending a study on temporalities and development.1 These notions have been indistinctly used in western thinking since the sixteenth century, a period wherein there was a rise in philosophical and scientific works which focused on the problems of their definitions and implications in the understanding of the phenomenon of time (Kant, 1996; Newton, 2004). I begin with the definitions built according to the bibliographical overview, which structure the semantic axis of the book, perspective from which other definitions and their theoretical backgrounds are evaluated. I define temporality as the apprehension of becoming, which every human being accomplishes through their cognitive system in a cultural context; and time, as the phenomenon of becoming in itself, which the human being is capable of apprehending as temporality (Iparraguirre, 2016, p. 616). The importance of distinguishing these concepts arises initially from the reading of Being and Time, by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, published in 1927, where he presented a definition of temporality that differs from the vulgar conception of time, as he terms the notion of time conceived as a succession of homogeneous instants. Heidegger suggests that ‘the existential and ontological constitution of the totality of the Da-sein is grounded in temporality’ (Heidegger, 1997, p. 398) and relates this concept to the being-toward-death

1 This chapter contains sections which have been published in previous works, revised and rewritten for this book (Iparraguirre, 2011, 2016).

5

6

Cultural Rhythmics

and daily nature. This ontology defines in Heidegger the comprehension of everything relative to the meaning of the being and his existence, terms that are not often used in Anthropology, but are present in constructs such as human being, social being or as it was pointed out by Pablo Wright in his work Beingin-the-Dream, where a being-in-the-world prior to the being-there is suggested, since we ‘are settled in the world even before being able to think about it’ (Wright, 2008, p. 34). Now considering the definition of time, on one hand, this resumes philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famous ideas, who clearly and concisely systematized conceptualizations on time and space, arriving at a metaphysical limit, which none of the thinkers who followed him reached. In his Critique of Pure Reason, an impressive work written in 1781, Kant says: Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience … Time is a necessary representation that grounds all intuitions … Time is therefore given a priori … Time does not inhere in objects, but merely in the subject who intuits them. (Kant, 1996, pp. 47–50) On the other hand, I resume the meaning of the term phenomenon formulated in Being and Time, to assert that time is a phenomenon. Heidegger says: ‘The confusing multiplicity of “phenomena” designated by the terms phenomenon, semblance, appearance, mere appearance, can be unraveled only if the concept phenomenon is understood from the very beginning as the self-showing in itself’ (Heidegger, 1997, p. 27). Therefore, the idea of time as phenomenon of becoming in itself rises from the set of formulations made by both thinkers. Initially, I resume the aprioristic definition of time to argue that whenever temporality is mentioned, it is in reference to a cultural construction, thus derived from a subject’s experience, hence not an a priori intuition. Time, then as a phenomenon, is intrinsic to every human being; on the other hand, temporality, besides being intrinsic to every human being, instead, acquires a cultural character, seeing as it depends on an in-context experience, thus, constituting an interpretation. Notions of time, as conceptualizations on the time phenomenon placed in a socio-historical context, are temporalities. The distinction is useful to avoid reducing the phenomenon (time) to only one interpretation (temporality). This is why the analysis of temporalities through rhythms and rhythmics allows us to carry out cross-cultural studies, as it allows us to understand both universal and particular aspects at the same time. For this reason, I propose to refer here to temporality, but not to time when alluding to notions of time of a

Temporality and Spatiality

7

socio-cultural group. Notions of time, as conceptualizations on the time phenomenon placed in a socio-historical context, are temporalities. This is precisely what happens with the hegemonic temporality and what this study proposes be reconsidered. The indistinct use of time and temporality in the knowledge provided by official education at all levels, and the socioeconomic context of the capitalist mode of production, contribute to naturalizing an equal meaning for both, therefore naturalizing the hegemonic temporality as the only possible way of thinking of the time phenomenon. This happens every day in our society and in particular, in the scientific praxis of any discipline (Iparraguirre & Ardenghi, 2011). We naturalized the notion that time can be a measurement, a duration, a period, an epoch, an age, a season, the hour, a distance, a division, the calendar and several other interpretations, without a necessary connection between them. The intent to distinguish temporality from time seeks to denaturalize this univocal logic, to be able to understand cultural diversity from multiple significations. If a notion of time is naturalized, it becomes naturally unique; then all knowledge built from that notion acquires a univocal epistemological character. The review of the philosophical and scientific bibliography (Adam, 1998, 2022; Bergson, 2004; Bohm, 1998; Dilthey, 1944; Gunn, 1986; Hawking & Penrose, 1996; Heidegger, 1997; Husserl, 1959; Kant, 1996; Newton, 2004; Prigogine & Stengers, 1998; Vostal, 2021), among others, enables us to understand that behind the notion of linear time imposed by western knowledge through different hegemonic processes, a notion of hegemonic temporality was generated, and raised to the character of notion of official time for its homogenization and imposition. This univocity and homogeneity is due to the official character that the western linear temporality has, originated and developed by different hegemonic processes during the past 2,500 years (Fig. 1).

1.2 HEGEMONIC AND ORIGINARY TEMPORALITY The term hegemony derives from the Greek eghestai, which means to lead, to be the guide, to be the leader. By hegemony, the ancient Greeks understood the supreme command of the Army, egemone was the conductor, the guide and also the chief of the Army. With regard to the relationship between this concept and the meaning given here to the term official, I consider the definition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy: ‘That which is by virtue of office, thus that has authenticity and emanates from the authority

Cultural Rhythmics

8

Main referents of the epoch

Ideas about time Becoming and transience

Pre-Socratics

The mutable and immutable The temporal and the eternal Parmenides and Heraclitus

Temporalities

Hellenic temporality Linear temporality Non-linear temporality

Distinction of time Aristotle

and time-consciousness

Aristotelian temporality

Time relative to movement Time as final datum of existence Plotinus

Time is given Change reveals time, though

Differentiated subjective and objective temporalities

it does not produce it Time is irrelevant History as progress Medieval thinkers St Augustine

towards the Divine

Christian temporality

Contempt for the temporal

Teleological temporality

process of history

(the future reaches the present)

Distinction of past, present and future Present as accumulative Modern thinkers Newton Kant

passage from the past to the

Capitalist temporality

future

Linear-mechanistic temporality

Time’s arrow in one direction

Abstract temporality

toward the future

(mathematical)

A priori intuition Dilthey, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger.

Einstein.

Experience and consciousness of time Duration and simultaneity Spatialisation

Western-official temporality (philosophical and scientific) Cosmological temporality

Relativity of the spacetime

Fig. 1. Constitutive Temporalities of Current Hegemonic Temporality.

derived from the State, and not particular or private’ (Española, 2001). From this definition, I resume the absence of indication to the historical moment referred to that authenticity, therefore suggesting a generic temporality, an abstract present thought for any society, without any reference to

Temporality and Spatiality

9

socio-historical context for the exercise of the State’s authority. It is precisely this abstract and depersonalized character of the validity of a law or knowledge, what I seek to describe when using the term official attached to the concept of hegemony. The concept of hegemonic temporality seeks to replace the concept of western temporality with which the notion of linear time is usually generalized in western societies and in the current scientific knowledge. Based on a historical overview, it is understood that this generalization of linear time hides the categorizations of temporality associated with processes of hegemonic character, such as the temporality exerted and imposed by a unique calendar in the Roman Empire; the Christian temporality imposed by the Catholic Church through its doctrine of eternal salvation; the ideals of time measurement from mechanical clocks in Modernity; the imposition of the monotheist and mercantilist logic in the colonization of the Americas; the establishment of the capitalist mode of production; industrialization and the rise of nationalism. The hegemonic temporality is thus defined as: the conceptualization of linear time conceived by western societies, through different processes of officialization, with a univocal notion of time. Furthermore, a hegemonic temporality is that which, imposed upon others, seeks to naturalize itself as the only possible conception. This process of homologation between what is naturally and univocally given builds up the naturalization of a notion, which, when massively imposed, is conceived as an official notion in the habitus (Bourdieu, 2006). The concept of originary temporality has its roots in the ethnographies carried out by anthropologists which include analysis of different notions of time. The study of cultural constructions of temporality has been a recurrent issue in Anthropology, although only being explicitly written about a handful of times. Reference to time conceived by studied groups has been present since the first ethnographies, though always indirectly or subsumed within another subject. Several authors consider Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss the pioneers of the anthropological studies on time, known today as Anthropology of Time (Bryant & Knight, 2019; Carbonell, 2004; Gell, 1992; Hodges, 2008, 2010; Iparraguirre, 2011; Knight, 2021; Munn, 1992; Terradas, 1998). To Gell, ‘anthropology of time can be traced in a well-known passage of The Elemental Forms of Religious Life where the social origin of the time category is presented’ (Gell, 1992, p. 3). The author suggests that Durkheim, in spite of the metaphysical confusions he opened when studying time from the social perspective, was the first one to do so and influenced authors who followed him. He opened the study of a problem historically dealt with by Philosophy to Anthropology and Sociology (Gell, 1992, p. 3). In that sense, it could be said

Cultural Rhythmics

10

that Durkheim is the interphase between the philosophical thinking of time and the anthropological one, a change that allowed us to begin to distinguish time from temporality, even though none of the authors who have followed in his footsteps have explicitly written about the necessary distinction between the two concepts. The choice of the term originary for describing this non-hegemonic temporality responds to the meaning of the second of the definitions: ‘originary (from Latin originarĭus) (1) Adj. That which gives origin to someone or something. (2) Adj. That which brings its origin from some place, person or thing’ (Española, 2001). Hence, originary temporality is defined as: any notion of time built by a social group which does not conceive it as a unique and univocal notion. It does not intend to formulate a temporality for each ethnic group by the mere fact of being able to distinguish them, since this would be an unreasonable relativism. It intends to denaturalize the official notion reproduced by states, as well as by scientific paradigm, and that therefore do not enable us to grasp other temporalities within our nation-states. The rhythmical otherness is only comprehensible if the hegemonic temporality is decentred from its unique and omnipresent position. As a rhythmical concept, the originary temporality allows us to understand the existence of different temporalities co-existing with the hegemonic temporality of a society. The anthropological bibliography shows multiple cases of originary temporality characterised by their distinction from the researcher’s temporality, or from the scientific notion of the anthropological discourse (Bourdieu, 2006; Bouysse-Cassagne, Harris, Platt, & Cereceda, 1987; Day, Papataxiarchis, & Stewart, 1999; Evans-Pritchard, 1977; Fabian, 2002; Geertz, 2003; Gell, 1992; Glenni & Thrift, 1996; Hall, 1983; Hallowell, 1955; Hubert, 1990; Leach, 1971; L´evi-Strauss, 1993; Malinowski, 1973; Mauss, 1979, 2007; Rigby, 1985). In this sense, the concept of originary temporality seeks to identify every temporality through the rhythmics, characterising the group’s cultural practices. Having exposed these definitions, I stress the need to work with three simultaneous concepts, in order to study the cultural rhythmics that allow us to grasp notions of time: temporality, hegemonic temporality and originary temporality.

1.3 SPACE AND SPATIALITY Just as the first section presents a theoretical approach for the interpretation of sociocultural issues in terms of temporality, it is now necessary to focus on

Temporality and Spatiality

11

conceptualizing the spatial dimension of culture and society. The methodology formulated so far to address the understanding of social dynamics lacks a territorial anchorage that provides it with a factual entity and enables the theory to be brought down to earth. The anchorage metaphor is accurate in pointing out that although one can navigate with a theoretical framework through any region of the ocean of ideas, the anchor positions us in a specific and unique place, and therefore, one should disembark attentively to the local conditionings, that is, to the local characteristics of space and spatiality. In this regard, I propose building a specific epistemological framework to characterize the territory, based on the critical assessment of the historical construction of spatial categories such as boundary, border, region and territory. The analytical focus is highlighting nuances of interpretation of these categories, differentiating precisely when they allude to space as phenomenon and when they connote a notion of space, that is, a spatiality. In other words, it is intended to build and promote a locally feasible epistemology. Another of the core axioms of this work is analyzing the territory from an anthropological perspective, and particularly as a spatiality. This requires knowing in advance the background upon which the scientific system for the interpretation of space, its parent concept, was built. The concept of space has been thoroughly problematized by both anthropology and geography. Both sciences have shown an interest in the subject since their beginnings in the nineteenth century, and it is therefore appropriate to revisit the fundamental reflections in order to strengthen the guidelines of a social theory of space, suitable for the analysis of contemporary socio-territorial issues. In this sense, the consideration of the territory in its multiple meanings that is carried out in this work requires the anchorage to the ground with the deployment of a specific theoretical framework, which can well be interpreted as an anthropology of space. This section considers, in the first place, the groundwork and leading figures that made possible the compilation of a philosophical and anthropological theoretical framework on space, centred on the difference with the concept of spatiality. Anthropological-geographical perspectives are added to this framework, while the proposal to consider the territory as spatiality is set out. In his sharp, though elegant style, Borges addresses the notion of space in the following exquisite digression on the differences between plants, animals and human beings: […] The substantive difference between vegetable life and animal life resides in one notion. The notion of space. While plants are ignorant of it, animals possess it. […] neighbour to the vegetable

12

Cultural Rhythmics

that gathers energy and the animal that accumulates space, man hoards time. (Borges, 1996, p. 52) The idea that the animal accumulates space and man hoards time allows us to introduce the problem. It is clear that, literally speaking, the sense of accumulating and hoarding is metaphorical. It inspires our imagination to take another look at the two central categories of our cognition, time and space. However, at a conceptual level, what does the breadth of meaning that the metaphor opens tell us? I understand that the paradox that his literary creation generates leads us to reflect on the difference between space as phenomenon and the human interpretations of this phenomenon called space. It is precisely the notion of space that I seek to distinguish here from space itself. In addition, without trying to discuss the philosophical implications of these ideas, they certainly lead us to think about the articulation between these two categories (space and time). As the physicist Minkowski ― who, along with Einstein, developed the idea of space-time ― already emphasized, they must be treated together, in an integrated way, in order to try to account for the syntax of ‘reality’, whether phenomenological or sociological: ‘Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality’ (Minkowski, 1923, p. 23). The distinction between space and spatiality presented here was initially formulated in correlation with the distinction between time and temporality (Iparraguirre, 2016), defining time as phenomenon of becoming in itself, and temporality as human apprehension of becoming. Complementing this conceptualization, space is defined as the material phenomenon of becoming, and spatiality as the human apprehension of space. By combining both definitions, we conclude that space is the material phenomenon of time, and that spatiality is the human apprehension of the material phenomenon of becoming. As observed, time and space are two words that refer to the same process of understanding, the becoming, which is useful to differentiate as we focus either on its continuity (time), or its materiality (space). I emphasize in becoming because the materiality of becoming, its tangibility, occurs only in the present. Meanwhile, thinking, the continuity of becoming (of time), enables us to apprehend the intangibility, the immaterial, from memory (past) and imagination (future). In other words, unlike time, which enables us to relate tensions of the past, present or future through our cognition, space, understood as the physical manifestation of becoming, provides access only to the present.

Temporality and Spatiality

13

Examples clarify the visualization of definitions. If we analyze the notion of history as temporality, and that of territory as spatiality, we can interpret that, as history ‘is’ in the past, we access it only through our representation of the historical, of the memory, that is, of our temporality. On the other hand, as territory is in the present, it becomes (is being) together with the subject that apprehends the becoming; it is precisely its contextualized apprehension of becoming that shapes the notion of territory, which is a spatiality. The philosophical thesis elaborated on the basis of the study of philosophers and physicists mentioned in Fig. 1 maintains that space is the matter of time, it is what makes time a phenomenon, seeing as otherwise it would imply that time is nothing more than a process. Although time is impossible to represent, it can be imagined as an absolute vacuum, void of matter, where it would be impossible to think of a difference between past and present, between what we saw and what we see, what we were and what we are. These thoughts are the source of reflection that enables us to think of time and space as an a priori, even if we always understand it a posteriori. With no intention to expand here on the philosophical arguments already outlined in the aforementioned work (Iparraguirre, 2016), I would simply like to emphasise a quote from philosopher Immanuel Kant that supports the analysis of the concept of territory as spatiality. Kant says in his Critique of Pure Reason: Space is not an empirical concept drawn from outer experiences […] the representation of space cannot be obtained from the relations of outer appearance through experience, but this outer experience is itself first possible only through this representation […] Space is a necessary representation, a priori, that is the ground of all outer intuitions. One can never represent that there is no space, though one can very well think that there are no objects to be encountered in it. It is therefore to be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, not as a determination dependent on them, and is an a priori representation that necessarily grounds outer appearances. (Kant, 1781/1996, p. 43) As proposed for the study of time distinguished from temporality, I do not use the word of origin (space), and instead work with substitutive terms (sphere, area, region, border, territory, place), which enable me to denaturalize our notion of space, like that of time, as univocal; therefore, it is essential to speak of spatialities and temporalities.

14

Cultural Rhythmics

1.4 HEGEMONIC AND ORIGINARY SPATIALITY The univocal and naturalized sense of the category space in Western scientific thinking has now led to an unstated use of that sense, generalized and extrapolated to other non-Western ways of thinking. This conceptualization can be traced back in the history of the European philosophical and scientific thinking, from the pre-Socratic era to the establishment of the natural and social sciences in the past two centuries. Reconsidering the genealogy drawn for the category time, it is feasible to reconstruct the various processes of officialization of the ‘Western space’ and consider that the current notion acquires the rank of hegemonic over other spatialities, which I call originaries. The hegemonic spatiality is therefore defined as the conceptualization of space as conceived by Western societies throughout various officialization processes with the characteristic of a univocal notion of space. In turn, a hegemonic spatiality is one that is imposed on others seeking to naturalize its conception as the only possible one. In contrast, the originary spatiality is defined as any notion of space built by a social group that does not consider it as a unique and univocal notion. The distinction seeks to denaturalize the official notion that both political and scientific discourses reproduce, and therefore, that do not enable us to understand other spatialities. Examples of originary spatiality are commonly found in indigenous groups, as evidenced by anthropological studies among Ilparakuyo Maasai shepherds in Africa (Rigby, 1985), the Inuit in Alaska (Mauss, 1979) or the Achuar of the ´ Ecuadorian jungle (Descola & Palsson, 2011). However, they are not limited to indigenous groups, and they may occur within any society where differential uses and representations of the territory are manifested. I was able to experience this myself among Mocov´ı groups in coexistence with the criollo society (Iparraguirre, 2011), similarly among Toba groups in Argentine Chaco (Wright, 2003, 2008), or when comparing cross-cultural frameworks like the one quoted below. The concept of spatiality is founded on the aforementioned anthropological groundwork, among which Edward Hall stands out as a pioneer in formulating proxemics studies on the use and perception of space (Hall, 1999), as a complement to the chronemics studies, focused on representations of time (Hall, 1959, 1983). Originally published in 1966, the book The Hidden Dimension (1999) presents, as a general framework, various aspects in which the structure of experience is affected by culture, making a parallel between biological and cultural substructures in the comparative analysis of human behaviour. His motivation is the growing trend of clashes between cultural systems of his time ― now openly exacerbated ― the anthropologist observed

Temporality and Spatiality

15

both among cultures of various countries and within the United States, where there is a mixture of cultures among urban and rural inhabitants: ‘Superficially, these groups may all look alike and sound somewhat alike, but beneath the surface are manifold unstated, unformulated differences in their structuring of time, space, materials and relationships’ (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 2). His analytical focus is ‘people’s use of space – the space that they maintain among themselves and their fellows, and that they build around themselves in their cities, their homes, and their offices’ (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 3), with the purpose of denaturalizing the assumptions that prevent the identification of the individual with himself, while reducing the alienation of urban life. It aims to investigate what the author calls the ‘social and personal space and man’s perception of it’ (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 6), and refers to proxemics as ‘the interrelated observations and theories of man’s use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture’ (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 6). Clearly, Hall focuses on space in everyday life, on the private and social spheres that are inhabited daily. His ‘use of space’ is a specific spatiality that, although it shares imaginary components with geographical spatialities (mainly the vitalist, space as sphere of life), has an openness to other notions of space, which I referred to as originary spatialities. Following in the footsteps of Franz Boas (1964), Hall stands in the tradition of symbolic anthropology for which communication is the crux of culture and language, together with the natural-cultural environment, structures the formation of thought. He maintains that it is not possible for the same phenomenon to signify the same experience for different people: ‘people from different cultures not only speak different languages, but what is possibly more important, inhabit different sensory worlds’ (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 8). He explains that the selective screening of perceived data happens through a series of sensory screens that are culturally patterned, which therefore results in the diversity of experiences among subjects. As architectural and urban environments are expressions of this filtering-screening process, man-altered environments teach us how different peoples use their senses (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 8). Even when Hall emphasizes the personal and immediate use of space by different cultures, he aims at being heard by architects, city planners and builders, who lay out and build cities with little reference to man’s proxemics needs (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 12). The fact that experience is not a stable point of reference for all subjects, it is what is legitimated when presuming that one’s own spatiality is a generalized experience. Hall presents concrete examples of originary spatiality when comparing proxemics in different cultural contexts, such as the American, European, Japanese and Arab. For example, on the use and perception of space, Hall explains that both the Japanese and the European concept of spatial experience

16

Cultural Rhythmics

differ from the American, which is much more limited, and he exemplifies it with the office setting, as everything unnecessary for work in the United States is considered a frill (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 69). He emphasizes that the difference between Japanese and Westerners is not only limited to the fact that Japanese are not direct when communicating (indirection), or that they give more importance to intersections than to lines in the organization of cities, as: …the entire experience of space in the most essential respects is different from that of Western culture. When Westerners think and talk about space, they mean the distance between objects. In the West, we are taught to perceive and to react to the arrangement of objects and to think of space as ‘empty’. The meaning of this becomes clear only when it is contrasted with the Japanese, who are trained to give meaning to spaces ―to perceive the shape and arrangements of spaces; for this they have a word, ma. (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 187) The author argues that ma, or interval, is a basic building block in all Japanese spatial experience, where an exquisite harmony between objects and void, between man and nature, is combined; and he recalls the classic example of the Zen monastery garden of Ryoanji, built in Kyoto in the fifteenth century. For the Japanese, the apprehension of space employs vision, and also olfaction, shifts in temperature, humidity, light, shade and the body, generating a full corporal use in the experience of space (p. 188). With respect to the Arab spatiality, Hall maintains that it is directly linked to the notion of internality and externality of the body and the rights associated with it, where the idea of a person exists somewhere down the body and the ego is not something hidden, it is reachable (pp. 191–193). There is a marked dissociation between body and personality, different from the Western one, which manifests itself in that they tolerate crowding in open spaces, but dislike being alone or between closed walls with no unobstructed views. He mentions the differences in manners when driving and behaving on the road, in lexicon and architecture, and highlights the difficulty of relating the abstract notion of boundary, as for the Arabs, although towns have ‘edges’ or ‘ends’, these are not viewed as hidden lines or permanent boundaries, nor is there an exact term for the legal concept of trespassing (p. 200). Hall summarizes his study by saying that ‘proxemic patterns differ and by examining them it is possible to reveal hidden cultural frames that determine the structure of a given people’s perceptual world’ (Hall, 1966/1999, p. 201), which leads to different ideas on overcrowded living conditions, interpersonal

Temporality and Spatiality

17

relations and ways of seeing local and international politics. In this sense, it is proposed that by taking into consideration the spatiality of a social group, we are able to characterize it and compare it with other groups that may have other spatialities, not only interculturally (such as the Mocov´ı, Japanese, Arab), but intraculturally. With regard to the methodological operationalization of the concept of spatiality, it was previously argued that in order to identify the temporality that characterizes a group, it is necessary to apprehend the various rhythms of life that constitute the organizational, economic, political and worldview dynamics of the group. This requires to identify, from ethnographic and bibliographic work, processes of social dynamics that are involved in the daily and seasonal rhythms of communication, sustenance and worldview, as well as the various uses and representations of the spheres where these rhythms of life are deployed. In the same sense and in a complementary way, it is maintained here that in order to account for spatiality in a group, it is necessary that the systematic study of the material manifestation of such processes is addressed: private and immediate spheres of life, seasonal uses of the territory, commuting or vacation journeys, strategic relocations, connections to the landscape, signification of symbolic places, virtual spheres of communication, spheres of management and decision-making, work and production, reflection and worship. To conclude, I must emphasize that the distinction between the treatment of space as a phenomenon and the interpretations on space that constitute spatialities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Haesbaert, 2011; Tomasi, 2010) is crucial for the understanding of groups with distinct interests, and it is precisely a fact that emerges from the interviews in each of the case studies described in the ethnographic chapters: to same words and actions, there are many and varied responses. Arbitrariness in the use of key concepts results in a multiplicity of approximate meanings of words. A sort of statistical semantics is generated and reproduced, which promotes overlapping, and generally contradictory, interpretations. For what has been said so far, I wish to point out that the usefulness of drawing up these theoretical guidelines to support an anthropology of space should be multiple, as it succeeds on setting a dialogue between the vocation to account for socio-territorial dynamics with the conditions of production of the social ‘spaces’: spheres of politics, management, production, consumption, leisure, rest, feeding, border, traffic, among others. This anthropology of space applied to the territory is put into practice in the following chapters in order to provide a set of simple operational tools that allow us to diagnose the spatialities in tension, articulating the necessary translation for an effective communication between the various notions and uses of space.

2 IMAGINARIES, RHYTHMICS AND DEVELOPMENT

2.1 SOCIAL IMAGINARIES Social imaginaries are nothing more than imagination in the plural. The capacity of every human being to have an imagination based on his or her own cognition extends to the capacity of human groups to have a shared imagination, produced and reproduced among its members through culture. Social imaginaries, cultural imagination and social imagination are three ways of referring to the same social process of the existence of plural imaginations, composed of multiple subjects and manifested in any material support that makes them long-lasting. A fourth form can be added: the collective imaginary. According to Emmanuel Lizcano, it is more appropriate to speak of collectivity than of social imaginary because both ‘social’ and ‘society’ have come to ‘monopolize all reference to the collective, the popular or the common, when in fact they emanate from a very particular form of collectivity, the one that illuminates the bourgeois imaginary that begins to take shape in seventeenth century Europe’ (Lizcano, 2009, p. 40). Even contemplating this solid argument, I consider that social imaginary may have a more far-reaching impact than the collective imaginary, since the latter term has been associated, at least in Argentina, to the psychoanalytic concept of ‘collective unconscious’, and tends to be interpreted as groups of homogeneous people; while social imaginary attributes a diversity of ideologies and access to resources to a group of heterogeneous social actors. Although it is difficult to define the imaginary, or as Lizcano points out ‘not susceptible to definition for the simple reason that it is the source of definitions’ (Lizcano, 2009, p. 46), I believe it is appropriate to risk an outline of

19

20

Cultural Rhythmics

enunciation to serve as a guide. Lizcano proposes the theoretical conception of what is called ‘imaginary’ is reviewed, by arguing that the main conceptualizations are metaphors that naturalize the imaginary, from the magmas of significations in Castoriadis to Durand’s semantic basins (Lizcano, 2009, p. 51). For its study he proposes that metaphors are powerful tool with which to analyze imaginaries insofar as it is not possible to refer to the imaginary only as a concept, but it is usually resorted to metaphors, whether dead or alive. Dead metaphors, or zombies, are those that are solidified in the imaginary, such as ‘saving time’ and ‘waste of time’, which imply living time as if it were money. The author explains that ‘metaphor is that tension between two meanings, that perceiving one as if it were the other but without being the other’ (Lizcano, 2009, p. 53). Living metaphors emerge from creativity and social change, which establish an unsuspected connection between two meanings, as poetic metaphors, such as ‘nature is a book’ proposed by Galileo, which is still valid today in images such as DNA sequencing (Lizcano, 2009, p. 60). Framed by a wide range of meanings and uses of the term, it is paramount that we specify what is meant here by imaginary, what is its historical construction as an analytical tool, and we distinguish the concept from others that have been considered as its replacements, simplifying its epistemological scope. For example, there is widespread use of the concept of ‘perception’ in studies applied to territorial problems, which tends to generalize that social actors’ thinking is summarized as this term and that it does not require further analysis than ‘listening in a participatory way to what people say’ (Mendez Casariego & Pascale Medina, 2014). In social sciences, ‘perception’ refers to the sensory process that mediates the ‘outside’ of the world and the ‘inside’ of the body, the reality-body interface. Even when perception participates in the configuration of the symbolic order of cognition (senses, sensitivity, affection, emotion, apprehension), its epistemological sense does not exhaust all the cognitive instances that involve language and mental representations that allow reality to be imagined. Therefore, ‘perception’ cannot be considered a substitute concept of social imaginaries. Now, if it is possible to replace imaginary with culture in certain cases, or incorporate it into scientific discourses as an operative analytical tool, that concept must be able to say the same thing or clarify ‘dark’ aspects of the latter. What is being said when we attribute the adjective ‘cultural’ to everyday problems that cannot be resolved or arise as contradictions that return cyclically, as if it were a Nietzschean eternal return? Where lies the difficulty of understanding ‘the cultural’ and the tendency to generalize that ‘the cultural’ explains and resolves all this misunderstanding? What is meant by associating

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

21

‘the cultural’ with ‘cultural ideas’, ‘cultural ideologies’, ‘cultural discourses’ and ‘cultural actions’ or ‘cultural practices’? Ideas mobilize the speeches, which are enunciated dragging ‘cultural prejudices’, as well as mobilize the actions, which are denoted in their corporality, gestures and practices. A conventional example of speech branded as cultural is ‘all politicians are the same’; and example of a cultural action is to throw a paper in a public place. In both cases, who mobilizes the practice, discursive or corporal is an idea and so here we come to the starting point of this section: Why is it useful to study imaginaries in order to interpret social processes if we can do it from ‘the cultural’? The ideas can be systematized and understood in a more efficient and enlightening way, if we incorporate the imaginary of the social actors and the correlation of these with individual and group practices in the discourse analysis. Then, this correlation between culture and imaginaries is simplified by defining that the culture of a group or a social actor can be assimilated to the set of imaginaries, discourses and practices that belong to that group/social actor. A single word that does not withstand such a semantic load is replaced, to distribute its meaning power among three other words, each one of them with its own historical background and different genealogies. Likewise, the conformation of any cultural process requires, at an individual level, the symbolic representation of reality (imagination and language) and factual intervention in material reality (practices). Going back to Wunenburger, ‘the imaginary […] its value does not reside only in its productions but in the use made of them. Imagination forces, in effect, to formulate an ethic and even a wisdom of images’ (Wunenburger, 2008, p. 25). Now, at the group level, the symbolic representation is unified in the set of social imaginaries that integrate the levels of imagination, ideas, ideology, sensitivity and language in all its manifestations, generating a particular worldview. In turn, the intervention with matter configures a use and transformation of it, a utility that is interpreted through group practices, generating a specific social dynamic (sociocultural, political and economic organization). In any case, this dichotomization does not relegate the necessary materiality that exists between the symbolic and the material plane, that is the necessary interdependence of how one level affects and conditions the other: ‘Men invent, develop and legitimize their beliefs in imaginaries, to the extent that this relationship with the imaginary obeys needs, satisfactions, short-term and long-term effects that are inseparable from his human nature’ (Wunenburger, 2008, p. 45). Returning to Durand’s approach, on the correlation between reflexology and psychosocial balance to which he associates the symbolic imagination

Cultural Rhythmics

22

(Durand, 2000, p. 125), we can summarize here that the correlation between imaginaries, discourses and practices make the interrelation of the dimension biological, linguistic and social. That, translated into other scientific codes or dialects can be associated with: cognitive, communicational, systemic; psychic, neurolinguistic, environmental. As can be seen, the sequence of concepts in triads can be continued if enough effort is made. For this reason, I emphasize that, as a terminological and semantic convention, to enrich the articulation between culture and imaginaries, and make it operational, work must be done on these three core concepts (imaginaries, discourses and practices), which will be reflected in the structure methodology of rhythmic analysis matrices. Considering the sources consulted, I conceptualize social imaginaries as sets of symbolic representations on ways of thinking and acting of a social group in its day-to-day life.

2.2 CULTURAL RHYTHMICS It is a theoretical-methodological assumption of this book that whenever problems concerning time or temporality are addressed, we are referring to rhythmics. The semantic use of the term rhythm replaces variants of the term time, such as temporal, temporals, a-temporals, temporalisation and others, which usually reduce meanings to other conventional or already naturalised uses. Facing the question of how to study the notion of time of a social group, its temporality, a correspondence between different definitions of time and rhythms was developed based on musical knowledge. In music, as well as in other arts, terms such as tempo, rhythmic, rhythm, or pulse are commonly used, all referred to the different appreciations on the flux of becoming and always present in every piece of music. Etymologically, the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy defines rhythm as: ‘Timed order in the succession or occurrence of things’ (Española, 2001) deriving it from the Greek term ῥeῖn, which means to flow. Its musical meaning says: ‘Proportion kept between the time of a movement and of another different one’ (Española, 2001). This last definition gets close to the notion proposed here. Rhythm is the conceptual element that brings us closer to the apprehensible instant, which is, to my understanding, where the transference of minimum information needed for humans to communicate is textured, the communicative syntax of every cultural system. This transference of information is made in this minimum differentiable rhythm, usually called instant, where it is given the only moment of continuity maintaining the

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

23

cognitive present in connection to its past and to its continuous coming, the future. In this direction, becoming is defined as the unity of signification to be prioritised at the moment of understanding the present Mocov´ı temporality. In this sense, to study cultural rhythmics in becoming, in that instant in which the whole subjective and social past continuously recreates itself in connection to the group rhythmic in which it is lived, provide us essential information on the logic that operates in the assimilation and naturalisation of a certain temporality. These reinterpreted concepts, relative to the study of ethnographies on temporality where social rhythms are described, make it possible to address the problem by analyzing the collective life rhythm of a group, the rhythm transferred by its members during daily collective activities, and is thus able to be apprehended in the participant observation. Therefore, the temporality of a society can be understood from the life rhythms that constitute a social, economic and worldview organization, which articulate the daily nature and habits of their subjects. The articulation between rhythm and temporality was already present in the first sociological and anthropological studies on time. The main mentor of the social study of rhythm was the French ethnologist Marcel Mauss: ‘rhythms and symbols not only bring the aesthetic and imaginative faculties of man into play, but at the same time all his body and soul’ (Mauss, 1979, p. 284). Mauss already proposed in 1924 that rhythms contribute to articulate imaginaries and practices, and that Anthropology, as well as Sociology and Psychology, should focus on the study of symbol and rhythm (Mauss, 1979, p. 280). Prior to that, in 1905, Mauss had already emphasized the importance of focusing on the ‘social morphology’ of the Inuit, when studying their rhythms of dispersal and concentration of individual and collective life, even arguing that ‘each social function has its own rhythm’ (Mauss, 1979, p. 429). In one of his conferences on Aesthetics at the Coll`ege de France given in 1935–1936, Mauss said: ‘Since the appearance of plastic arts, notions of equilibrium have emerged, thus notions of rhythm; and since the appearance of rhythmics, art emerged. Socially and individually, man is a rhythmic animal’ (Mauss, 2007, p. 147). When describing the aesthetic phenomenon, Mauss formulates an alternative definition based on rhythm reviving psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and another pioneer of rhythms, ethnologist Franz Boas, who proposed to study rhythm in decorative arts, dance, music and literature of native North American societies (Boas, 1925). In Mauss’ words: [Boas] connects all art to rhythm, for where there is rhythm, generally there is something aesthetic: where there are tones,

24

Cultural Rhythmics

variation in touch and intensity, generally there is something aesthetic. Prose is only beautiful when it is to some extent rhythmic and to some extent chanted. Differences in tone, touch and feeling –all this is rhythm and all this is art. (Mauss, 2007, p. 68) Durkheim mentions the term rhythm to refer to the time category: ‘The calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity […] what the category of time expresses is the common time for the group, the social time’ (Durkheim, 1982, p. 9). The concept of rhythm as regulator of social activities emphasizes how rhythm is embedded in every temporality. Durkheim explains that religious life is structured in ‘regularly repeated acts’, which constitute collective rhythms, and he uses them as an experimental proof of the belief in social events of religious character (1982, p. 8). Evans-Pritchard is one of the first ethnographers to stress the concept of rhythm to think of the studied group’s temporality. He refers to: …three layers of rhythms: physical, ecological and social. The Nuer observe the movements of celestial bodies, other than the sun or the moon … but they do not regulate their activities in relation to them, nor they use them as points of reference for the account of the seasons … Cattle needs and variations on food supply are the ones that mainly translate the ecological rhythm into the social rhythm of the year, and the contrast between ways of life at the height of the rainy season, and of the dry season is that which provides the conceptual poles for the temporal account. (Evans-Pritchard, 1977, pp. 114–115) These three layers enable us to understand how Nuer conceive time, in what Evans-Pritchard describes as account, although it is not a quantitative calculation. Chronology, for example does not express itself through the numbering of years but through the reference to the system of age groups (Evans-Pritchard, 1977, p. 122). It is surprising to think that it is not relevant to know how many years happened in an event recapitulation, something inconceivable to any person formed in the western temporality who orders their own life based on the account of their birthdays and what has been done in between and during them. The same happens with the location of a moment in the past and that depends on what time of the year it is: ‘The Nuer do not use names of the months for marking the time of an event … Time is a relation

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

25

between activities … Time does not have the same value throughout the year’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1977, pp. 119–120). This focus of Anthropology on the ‘rhythmic issues’ is completed with the emergence of subsequent studies along the 20th century, which unfortunately did not succeed in awakening new interests. For example, in Malinowski (1973), who explains the Trobriand islanders calendar in New Guinea ruled by agricultural and social rhythms; in Hall (1983) who studies rhythms implied in the synchronization processes between people and their different behaviours in monochronic and polychronic societies; in Turner (2005) who analyzes the rhythm of music and dancing in the different types of ndembu rituals in Zambia; in Descola (1996) who observes rhythms of hunting journeys and the rhythm of energy consumed among the Achuar in the jungle of Ecuador; in Durand (2004) who applies a generalized use of the term rhythmical, sometimes related to seasonal cycles and agricultural rhythmics, as well as to the recurrence of mythical cycles; in Bourdieu (2006) who analyzes how capitalism is imposed on the life rhythms of Kabyle society in Algeria. In addition to these works in Anthropology, there are outstanding studies addressing rhythmic issues such as Lefebvre (2004) on rhythm analysis, in which the interaction between notions of time, production of space and comprehensions of everyday life is analyzed. Similarly, Bachelard (2011) applied a philosophical perspective to the study of space, the imagination and body rhythms. Zerubavel (1985) suggested addressing the rhythms hidden in the schedules and calendars of social life from the perspective of sociology of time. Both John Dewey and Susanne Langer studied the concept of ‘vital rhythm’ in connection with the aesthetic experience of art and the existence of art forms (Kruse, 2007). Recently, Goodman (2010) applied rhythm analysis to the study of sonic culture, the politics of frequency and the ecology of fear. In brief, cultural rhythmics is proposed as a methodology built to study temporality among different social groups and inside them. Studying different rhythmic experiences integrated in the participant observation enables us to interpret social facts that are implicit in the everyday practices of organization, in the economic-political relations and in the group’s worldviews. Recovering the phrase by Edward Hall, when he refers to the cultural patterns linking time and culture as ‘the language of time’ (Hall, 1983, p. 3), it can be said that cultural rhythmics are the language of temporality. Rhythmics are, in this sense, a theoretical and methodological language to carry out the purpose of critiquing hegemonic temporalities and their practices. The methodology of cultural rhythmics enables us to analyze development as temporality and its use in the analysis of daily practices that dynamize development. They are part of a set of theoretical and methodological precepts

26

Cultural Rhythmics

that defines and sets in motion a precise mode for researching and interpreting social phenomena, whose philosophical and scientific backgrounds can be found in Boas (2010), Mauss (1979), Bachelard (2011), Durand (2004), Evans-Pritchard (1977), and L´evi-Strauss (1993). Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004) demonstrates a strong ‘mode of analysis of everyday life’, to put it in his words, that runs in the same direction and constitutes a complementary method to the one presented here. Recent publications follow Lefebvre’s direction such as Goodman (2010), Blue (2017), Alhadeff-Jones (2017, 2021), and Dakka (2021). At a conceptual level, cultural rhythmic defines the set of life rhythms that enables us to characterize and interpret constitutive practices of a group of people’s social dynamics in their everydayness (reference of a previous work). As a method, cultural rhythmics constitute a tool to understand the connection between life rhythms and processes of social dynamics, differentiating notions of time (temporality) and notions of space (spatiality). Here, it is understood that, in the same way a rhythm of life can characterize a person’s way of living, the set of life rhythms of a social group can characterize it at a group level, both symbolically and materially. This conceptual complement of rhythms and rhythmics enables us to address the articulation between imaginaries, discourses and practices by studying the collective life rhythm of the studied group, that is the cultural rhythmics their members reveal in their practices, and therefore are able to be grasped in the participant observation. However, is there a feasible way to differentiate the sets of rhythmics that can be diagnosed and analyzed in a specific social dynamic? According to the scheme proposed for the interpretation of the various rhythms which are tuned into during the anthropological observation of social life, it is possible to group them under three operational categories: (1) social organization rhythmics; (2) sustenance rhythmics; (3) worldview rhythmics (Fig. 2). These groupings are neither watertight compartments of an abstraction, nor arbitrary segments of a reality from which it symbolic-material totality is discerned. Instead, they systematize life rhythms in three dimensions of the social dynamics in order to conceptually place them and make them operational as method of social research. This classification is not fixed and its denominations may be permeable to variations, which are, in turn, likely to be fused. The first group, rhythmics of the social organization, comprises daily and seasonal life rhythms, as well as communicative rhythms. Those certainly include every organization of a cultural nature; however, I am not using the term ‘cultural’ in order not to create confusion with the cultural rhythmics that give the name to the method. I insist that cultural rhythmics set up a

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

27

Cultural rhythmics Social dynamics Rhythmics of social organization

Rhythms of life Daily rhythms

Temporality Daily and hourly organization

Spatiality Uses of intimate, local, immediate spheres of life

Schedule of actions and tasks Mobilities Attitude towards becoming Seasonal rhythms

Calendars

Seasonal use of territory, movements, rotations

Seasonal schedules Natural / cultural landscapes Cumulative chronology Topologies Natural cycles apprehension Communicative rhythms

Linear and non-linear narratives

Private and social places

Artistic expressions

Symbolic, virtual spheres

Virtual and Internet rhythms

Communicative cultural fields and capitals

Globalized rhythms Academic rhythms Rhythmics of administration

Economic rhythms

Production and work rhythms Rhythms of local and global markets

Spheres of production, sustenance, work Virtual spheres of financial production

Rhythms of consumption Political rhythms`

Rhythms of bureaucracy, mediation of representatives, relations of power

Spheres of management Public / private / collective spheres

Urgency and emergent Decision making environments Rhythms in decision making Agenda design, planning, anticipation Rhythmics of worldview

Ritual rhythms

Rhythms of religious practices, beliefs, worshipping

Spheres of reflection and worship Oneiric places

Rhythms of celebrations, disruptions, catastrophes

Sacred places

Philosophy of life, visions of the world

Fig. 2. Composition of Cultural Rhythmics.

methodology that requires we differentiate notions of time (temporalities) and notions of space (spatialities) within each systematization of rhythms. I must add that biorhythms are intertwined in the shaping of rhythmics by generating the physiological dynamics that sets the homeostasis of every human body. In his work Time, the familiar stranger (1987), Julius T. Fraser sketches out a close correlation between biorhythms, social cycles and various temporalities, which although not specifically treated, open up a broad field of study to explore. For example, when mentioning that ‘Time reckoning by bird migration is an ancient custom. It was still very much alive in the Europe of the 1930s … but began to disappear as industrial and commercial rhythms took

28

Cultural Rhythmics

over the task of timekeeping’ (p. 123); or when explaining that ‘social cycles are rhythmic schedules, cyclic variations in the amplitude or nature of one or another of the variables, such as work, of the social present’ (p. 190). Daily life rhythms, at temporality level, are constituted by the organization of the daily activities, as well as work and tasks schedules. They define the attitudes (projective or futural) towards these life rhythms; at the spatiality level, daily rhythms are expressed in the uses of intimate or immediate spheres of life, either home, school, work or at the local scale of individual or group movements. Edward Hall has extensively referred to these notions of space in his studies on proxemics, where he distinguishes ‘types of spaces’ based on the analysis of various distance modalities (intimate, personal, social, public) (Hall, 1999). An example of daily cultural rhythmics are the rhythms that refer to everyday organizational processes, such as work, family or traffic rhythms, applicable to the analysis of the ‘empirical regularities’ suggested by Wright (2020) for the analysis of the traffic habitus. Seasonal life rhythms, at temporality level, are constituted by the apprehension of celestial phenomena (sunrises and sunsets, moon phases, solstices and equinoxes) and the interaction with their manifestations (tides, seasons, annual sun path), as well as by the calendar organization present in ‘time counting’ instruments, such as calendars, world time zones, historical and/or geological chronologies. At spatiality level, these rhythms are apprehended in the seasonal use of territories, people’s movements for work or holidays and strategic movements (as in goat grazing). An example of seasonal cultural rhythmics is calendar rhythmics (days, weeks, months, years) and tourism rhythmics. I emphasize that they should not be confused with seasonal natural rhythmics, such as the rhythmics of the lunar cycle (the set of rhythms generated by moon phases). Communicative life rhythms are revealed, at the temporality level, in the narrative rhythms of speech and of various literary genres, in the linearity or non-linearity of the discursive content, in the rhythms of artistic expressions, in the rhythms of non-verbal communication, in the rhythms of virtual life (length of digital processes) and in globalized rhythms (TV, radio, internet, phone). At the spatiality level, these rhythms are found either in the use of both private and public places, in the representation of symbolic and virtual spheres (Canevacci, 2013; Garc´ıa Canclini, 2008). Examples of communicative cultural rhythmics are the virtual rhythmics of online life, the gestural rhythmics of sign language or the performative rhythmics (in dance, music, theatre, painting and others). The second group, rhythmics of sustenance, gathers economic and political rhythms. The term ‘sustenance’ is used to unify the economic-political

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

29

binomial into a further degree of systematization, which entails the criterion of sustenance of life in the economic and political practices. Economic life rhythms operate at the temporality level in the rhythms of production and work, the rhythms of the tangible local market and the intangible global market, rhythms of consumption, rhythms of banking and financial systems (Appadurai, 2017); at the spatiality level, these rhythms are sustained in the notions of space implied in the transformation of raw material into product (production of goods, social relations of production), and in the representation of ‘production environments’ (agricultural soil, mining mountain, fishing water). Examples of economic cultural rhythmics are the production, financial, tax, salary rhythmics. Even though these can be considered as everyday rhythmics, they may respond either to daily or seasonal practices, by which they are differentiated from both groups of rhythms. Then, political life rhythms, at temporality level, are those rhythms of the representation of facts and people on behalf of institutions, rhythms of mediation, bureaucracy and the rhythm in decision-making (the ‘right now’, ‘the urgent’). The notions of space involved are built in spheres of management (public and private), in state administration with no private ‘owners’, in decision-making environments (places with symbolic capitals of power, such as government ‘houses’). Examples of political cultural rhythmics are rhythmics of government, management, rhythmics of international organizations and lobbies, rhythmics of clientelism, electoral rhythmics, among others. Finally, the rhythmics of the worldview comprise the ritual life rhythms. At the temporality level, we can differentiate the rhythms of religious practices (rhythms when praying, attending services, marrying, meditating), rhythms of celebrations, dances and every disruptive event of the stable social order, rhythms denoting philosophies of life or visions of the world. The notions of space involved in ritual rhythms are present around spheres of reflection and worship, places considered sacred (temples, churches). Examples of cultural rhythmics of the worldview are all those ritual rhythmics, religious in a broad sense, that in varied ways re-unite the actor with the social group they identify with (rhythmics of meditation, contemplation, daydreaming). This rhythmical schematization of the social dynamics does not necessarily imply a ‘search’ in the fieldwork for all the rhythms mentioned for explaining the dynamics of the studied group. It operates as a ‘catalogue’ of ‘behaviours’ likely to be found or deserving attention. Certainly, there are others not mentioned here that may generate another setting of rhythms, thus creating permutations, overlaps, broadenings or resignifications of rhythms and rhythmics, respectively.

30

Cultural Rhythmics

2.3 MATRICES OF IMAGINARIES AND RHYTHMICS Social imaginaries can be analyzed through matrices that organize these representations into inclusive hierarchical levels. This method was created from the need to achieve a standard of organization of ethnographic material, allowing comparison of social groups and case studies with each other in order to get a synchronic result out of them. This emerges epistemologically from the analysis and reinterpretation of authors such as Appadurai (2015), Bachelard (2011), Baczko (2005), Castoriadis (1989), Durand (2004), Ricoeur (2012), and Wright (2008). Matrices of imaginaries provide a scheme of the symbolic field of the interlocutors arranged by the ethnographer, in order to systematize interview answers, conversations and the analysis of the respective discourses. Likewise, an ethnographic approach to the imaginaries necessarily entails considering the interlocutor’s voice at the moment of designing the tool of analysis, and this must not necessarily measure and codify them for translating their logics, knowledges and practices. Matrices schematize the set of mapped representations in order to analyze the social dynamics of a single or several social groups, for this reason they are interspersed with the analysis of the rhythmics. If described in a simplified way, the method introduces three complementary levels of signification: constellation (main imaginaries), component (symbolic representations) and category (discursive concepts). Durand’s notion of ‘constellation’ was maintained as a broader category, and what the author calls the scheme and structure of an imaginary was assigned to ‘component’ (Durand, 2004, pp. 442–443). As ‘category’ refers to discourse, it synthesizes the plane of symbols and a set of representations associated with the language that emerges from the daily dialogue with the interlocutors. It is considered at the most general level in terms of ‘constellations’ since, as Wunenburger emphasizes, ‘the most innovative approaches to the imaginary are oriented towards the identification of coherent constellations that reveal their capacity for self-organization of ideas, affects and actions of the agents that convey it’ (Wunenburger, 2008, p. 59). The deconstruction of each imaginary into its components was carried out by considering the objectives and the hypotheses constructed as research vectors. As will be explained in its application, it is at the level of the components where the discrepancies that give rise to divergent meanings of the same groupings of imaginaries that operate in the constellations are manifested. That is, for the same set of imaginaries, such as the ‘territory’ constellation, different components can be found (identity, production,

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

31

technology) that result in the associated categories (family, history, migrate, work) these imaginaries differ to a lesser or greater degree. It should be clarified that the synchronic result refers to the analytical result of correlating the categories, components and constellations in an inclusive hierarchy of meanings. This does not refer at all to the ‘componential analysis’ proposed by cognitive anthropologists in the 1960s, such as Goodenough, who argued that the a society’s culture could be specified as the set of rules of cognitive behaviour that allowed it one be an acceptable member and get ‘inside the native head’ (Reynoso, 2008, pp. 354–355). With ‘components’, I am not referring to the notion of ‘semantic domains’ nor to the ‘lexemes’ that these are used to analyze ‘discrete semantic features, each of which assumes a value that has to be chosen among a few values possible’ (Reynoso, 2008, p. 356). Far from trying to establish ethnolinguistic formulas or mathematical algorithms loaded with meanings, the imaginary matrices only offer a scheme of the symbolic field of the interlocutors ordered by the ethnographer – not by the natives – with the purpose of systematizing the responses of interviews, conversations and analysis of the respective speeches. This methodology is not assimilable to the operationalization method used in sociological approaches to territorial development, such as the ‘construction of the human development index’, in which it is sought to translate concepts into components and these into indicators (Di Filippo, 2008, pp. 14–15). Although these works claim to include intangible aspects such as ‘the perception of people about the satisfaction of their needs’ (Di Filippo, 2008, p. 33), among the criteria for the operationalization of qualitative variables, these ‘perceptions’ are revealed through surveys that predetermine the responses of the interlocutors to ‘degrees of satisfaction’ with: work, personal fulfilment, work environment, the ‘degree of confidence in the local government’ or the ‘perception of the variation in their standard of living’ for that matter of the concept, and finally, the ‘quality of life’ (Di Filippo, 2008, pp. 37–38). That is, the subjectivity of the social actors is filtered by the objectivity of the logical scheme with which the data matrix to be surveyed was made. This prevents distorting the fact that such categories may have different meanings for different populations. Although these sociological methods are useful when planning development projects and programmes, they do not exhaust the potential of qualitative studies that seek to interpret the dynamics of social groups to propose interventions. An ethnographic approach to imaginaries necessarily implies that the voice of the interlocutors must be considered when designing the instrument of analysis, and it does not necessarily have to measure and codify them in order to translate their logics, knowledge and practices. I understand that the replacement of exclusively quantitative indicators and

32

Cultural Rhythmics

variables, as this work proposes, or as the research-action formulated by Greenwood and Levin (2006), must start from dense descriptions – as Geertz called them (2003) – deep narratives that seeks to extend and translate the voice of the interlocutors, without synthesizing them and reducing them to mere units of measurement. It is also sought that they have a language that is friendly to non-specialized technicians or social actors involved. The last result of these dense descriptions is to translate imaginaries, discourses and practices into different narrative genres that generate decision-making instruments applied according to their purpose: public policy, strategic plans, management models, intervention programmes, ethnographic essays, methodological manuals, qualitative and statistical indicators, among others. Exercising a recapitulation of the concepts and method of the entire chapter: How it is possible to distinguish an imaginary from a rhythmic? I take the category ‘progress’ as an example; is it a rhythmic or an imaginary? It is not a rhythmic because there is no specific practice that is ‘progress’, the action of progressing is not practiced; since it is a cultural construction that is expressed in concrete practices such as sowing, harvesting, guiding or another concrete action. Nor is there a set of specific rhythms that define ‘progress’. On the other hand, it can be conceived as imaginary, as a set of representations that can be conceptualized as a component of one or several imaginaries. For example, ‘progress’ is a key component of the imaginary development, or the imaginary modernity, or these two are constellations of the imaginary capitalism. Likewise, ‘progress’ can be broken down into categories that provide greater precision: ‘wealth’, ‘well-being’, ‘comfort’, ‘good life’, just to mention a few. Although the phrase ‘at the rhythm of progress’ is popularly used, it is precisely an image that resorts to the imaginary of the concept of ‘rhythm’ to give support to symbolic components such as ‘change’, ‘speed’ or similar. On the other hand, are social and rhythmic practices the same? No, they aren’t because practices can be classified separately as corporeal and material actions independently of the representations that are held about them. On the other hand, the rhythmic ones integrate the practices of a social group in the context of imaginaries and discourses the symbolic level that condenses social imaginaries, and to do so it is necessary to analyze temporality and spatiality implicit in the social imaginaries of the group. In this sense, it is argued that to apply an analysis of cultural rhythmics, it is necessary we know the spatiality and temporality of the group under observation, working with the different rhythms of life that can identify it: daily, seasonal, communicative, economic, political and ritual rhythms (Fig. 2). Then it is feasible to build a descriptive cultural rhythmic of the group, by analyzing its main social imaginaries (returning to the previous example, the uses and representations of the

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

33

territory, of the places, of the heritage, of the family, of the trajectory of life, of the ways of production, religiosity, among others), in sync with their practices (the rhythms that give us access to the organization, sustenance and worldview of the group). Finalizing this chapter, the conceptual articulations proposed as a theoretical-methodological framework to diagnose and analyze sociocultural dynamics in the territory is completed. The epistemological journey proposed at the beginning of the chapter is also completed: starting from the classic concept of ‘culture’ and translating it, after this systematization of imaginaries and rhythms, to the concept of ‘cultural rhythmics’.

2.4 DEVELOPMENT AS GLOBAL TEMPORALITY The socio-political approach of this book proposes that social processes, such as those involved in the exercise of ‘development’, must be denaturalized and demystified for its efficient systematization, study and application. If perspectives for decision-making would be provided from this type of study, then it is a priority to know precisely what these ‘cultural artifacts’ are, how they were historically constructed and how they are embedded in the rhythms of life of our society. Questioned from the root, what is development? Is it an imaginary, a discourse, a practice, a rhythmic or a social process? Both its Saxon etymology, dis-envelop (development), and its Latin, rutulus (wheel), denote the idea of unrolling or extending what was rolled up. The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy distinguishes between development and develop (Española, 2001). For development it says ‘Action or effect of developing’, while for develop it says ‘Extend what is rolled up, undo a roll’ and also ‘Increase, something of a physical, intellectual or moral order’ and ‘Said of a human community: progress, grow economically, socially, culturally or politically’ (Española, 2001). Obviously, they are naturalized definitions in a progressive view of development, and there is no mention of possible differential notions of these that are offered. Another of the meanings emphasizes its future character: ‘Happen, occur, become’ (Española, 2001). Just as there is a wide spectrum of definitions, there are multiple fields that have analyzed it, directly or indirectly, either to analyze and criticize development as an object of study, or to reproduce and increase what development is supposed to generate (economic capitals, profits, markets). I propose deconstructing (Derrida, 2005) the concept as a naturalized category and

34

Cultural Rhythmics

exploring the possible components that characterize the symbolic fields of ‘development’. Now, taking these epistemological precautions to deconstruct and rethink the genetic categories of ‘development’, the way is paved to face its conceptualization as temporality. By applying the definitions from the previous section, and maintaining that every cultural object or process is here reinterpreted as a triad of imaginaries, discourses and practices, ‘development’ is clearly a composition of the three elements; therefore, it can be treated as an imaginary that takes on different discursive forms and can be practiced in multiple ways. Likewise, we can maintain that it is not about any of these elements separately. It is not only an imaginary, it does not occur only on the discursive level, nor is it reduced to a concrete action. In fact, it is not feasible to practice development but to exercise certain practices that promote or materialize it (producing food, marketing it, paying taxes, etc.). This leads us to position development within the context of imaginaries, in the first place, and to distinguish its temporal character (process in becoming) over its spatial character (materiality of becoming). Development as a concept is a rationalization of the apprehension of time that implies the three tensions of every temporality: origin (past), becoming (present) and destiny (future) of a process. If, as an exercise, we consider the biological development of any living creature, the interpretation of the concept is always diachronic as current development is understood in comparison to a previous stage (how it developed) or to a future stage (how it will develop). Although the term is not directly used, there are multiple allusions to ‘the process of development’ in daily life, as it often happens in family contexts: ‘look how big your kid is!’ or ‘how fast you grew up!’ or ‘the town took off; it developed’. In other contexts – economics, politics or media – its use often has a negative connotation: ‘underdeveloped or developing countries’ (those unable to balance their past with their present), or a positive one when mentioning: ‘overdeveloped sectors’ (when their present is ahead of their future expected in later stages). Whichever expression is used, the semantic structure of the various definitions of ‘development’ entails the three tensions of every temporality that, for broadening its meaning, I associate with origin, becoming and destiny; in Western societies, this temporality has precise ontological characteristics: linear, projective and cumulative. As stated in Chapter 1, temporality is all human interpretation of becoming that sustains us in life; a becoming that has been assigned with multiple variations of what was historically called ‘time’. The indistinguishable usage of time and temporality in everyday language, either in political, scientific, pedagogical or media discourses, contributes to naturalizing the same meaning

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

35

for both concepts, therefore naturalizing the hegemonic temporality as the only possible way of thinking about the phenomenon of time. The hegemonic temporality, understood as the conceptualization of Western linear time in various processes of officialization, is detected in the analysis of the imaginaries when considering the existence of other temporalities responding to other logics and attitudes facing becoming, and not conceived as unique and univocal. Likewise, development, as a central concept of the hegemonic temporality, is naturalized as a unique notion of the sense of life – individual and collective – when it is stated, for instance, among other similar expressions: ‘there is no progress without development’. Interpreting development as temporality implies a notion that cannot be univocal, that it has a historical construction crossed by processes of officialization and that by acquiring its hegemonic character it imposes itself onto other notions, replacing, syncretizing or removing them. The various notions of development are circumscribed to both, the uses (daily practices) plus the representations of the processes (temporality), and locations (spatiality) where the mentioned development occurs, is done and undone, is produced, managed and consumed. In Claude L´evi-Strauss’ words: ‘A society is always a spatial-temporal given, and therefore subject to the impact of other societies and of earlier states of its own development’ (cited in Mauss, 1979, p. 20). The philosophical and scientific problematization of ‘development’ withdraws in another horizon of problematics: that of the cultural discontinuities that goes back to the ‘discovery’ of the New World with the 16th-century European colonialism (L´evi-Strauss, 1979, pp. 294–303). As explained by the author, a unitary vision of development of mankind emerges from the context of that process, conceived as progression, regression or a combination of both. L´evi-Strauss highlights that those societies which today we call ‘underdeveloped’ are not such through their own doing, and one would be wrong to conceive of them as exterior to Western development (hegemonic) or indifferent to it. In truth, they are the very societies whose direct or indirect destruction between the 16th and the 19th centuries have allowed the development of the Western world (L´evi-Strauss, 1979, pp. 296–297). Considering the interpretation of development as temporality, the difference stated by L´evi-Strauss between cumulative history, associated with ‘progressive cultures’, and stationary history, associated with ‘inert cultures’, can be found in our context in the stigmatizations attributed to ‘market sectors’ or groups of producers, which are not strictly functional to the serialized accumulation of capitalism. In fact, we can resignify those definitions to

36

Cultural Rhythmics

circumscribe at least two notions of development: the cumulative development associated to the hegemonic temporality of the Western capitalist mode of production and living, and the stationary development associated to originary temporalities with a different attitude towards becoming, lying far from the canon of accumulation and progress. Caution is required in this sense when ‘types’ of development are remarked, as the author points out: At every occasion we are inclined to call a culture inert or stationary, we must therefore ask ourselves if that apparent immobility does not stem from our ignorance of its true interests, and if, with its own criteria – which are different from our own – that culture is not a victim of the same illusion with respect to us. (L´evi-Strauss, 1979, p. 320) Both notions of development, both temporalities, are neither diametrically polarized, nor impossible to find together in a same socio-territorial process; on the contrary, what we observe is a coexistence of modes of production, living and developing; in short, coexisting in the same territory. We are then able to visualize at the regional level what L´evi-Strauss clarified more than 50 years ago at the world level – what today we call global: No world civilization [aka globalization] can exist because civilization implies the coexistence of cultures offering among themselves the maximum of diversity and even consists in this very coexistence. […] all cultural progress depends on a coalition of cultures. (L´evi-Strauss, 1979, p. 336) To sum up, development is a constellation of imaginaries rather than a specific practice; it is an interpretation of becoming and matter, and specifically, on how ‘things’ unfold in the becoming. Development, as well as progress, is an imaginary of the becoming. We see a blooming plant and say: ‘it is developing, it evolved’ or when comparing groups of similar plants or animals, it is usually said: ‘here we can clearly see how this species developed’, although obviating in this reasoning that the term ‘evolution’ is a component of the imaginary ‘development’, which then implies an evolutionist interpretation of biological change, as if there were no others (L´evi-Strauss, 1993; ¨ Schrodinger, 1997; Sheldrake, 2006). In articulation with the proposed ethnographic framework, the post-colonial perspective is integrated because ‘different places produce different kinds of ethnographic bodies’ (Wright, 2005, p. 71) and, therefore,

Imaginaries, Rhythmics and Development

37

implies moving from conceiving universal subjects and narratives to localized, geopolitically conditioned subjects and narratives. Just as the theory of relativity transformed the interpretation of the Cosmos from static and universal in mechanical physics to a relative and local functioning, current anthropological criticisms promote that social dynamics and processes can reach another level of interpretation and politic incidence, by outlining a local, interstitial and plural analysis of social matter, giving a voice to the different temporalities and spatialities. As will be seen below in Chapter 3, when analyzing the interviews, the images and discourses around ‘development’ do not, in any case, define a specific practice. They are not social facts in the manner of Durkheim, they are not only relations of production in the manner of Marx, and they are not only social actions in the manner of Weber; although they assume all of these. We take a stand against the future that we suppose as development, as our un-wrapping against the world, against the permanent change of things and life, that is, of becoming. In the course of the work, it will be made explicit that ‘development’, based on the components ‘progress’ and ‘evolution’, make up a triad of cultural imagination that provides symbolic material to linear temporality. That is, to the apprehension of the phenomenological becoming that assumes that the past is an accumulation of events that have been, and the future its inverse image, an accumulation of events that have not yet been. In short, development is the main imaginary of global hegemonic temporality, since it brings together the set of symbolic representations that support the linear-cumulative temporality of globalized capitalism.

3 RHYTHMICS OF DEVELOPMENT IN ARGENTINA

This chapter condenses the application of the theoretical and methodological framework presented in the previous chapters to four complementary study cases: heritage, tourism, agriculture and politics.1 Considering ethnographic examples from the fieldwork carried out during the last 15 years in Argentina, it proposes articulating social imaginaries about development with the cultural rhythmics that dynamise the daily life of social groups. The first case comprises territorial and scientific imaginaries surrounding cultural heritage, focussing on management and research experiences. In this sense, an analysis of the various experiences of cultural management on the territory allows us to find ways to create applicable conceptual and methodological tools. The second case describes and analyses the main rhythmics of rural tourism from the emergence of three recurring concepts classified as constellations of imaginaries: development, territory and heritage. These concepts were all obtained during fieldwork. From the identification and analysis of these imaginaries, we can organise the interpretation of the field of representations on rural tourism, which allows us to characterise the actor’s discourses in parallel with the ethnographic observation of touristic rhythmics carried out in their everyday praxis. The third case proposes identifying the agricultural production imaginaries, acknowledging the historical constructs behind the categories and symbolic valuations present in agricultural practices, both on the part of technicians as on that of producers and officials. An analysis of the agrarian activity in 1 This chapter contains sections which have been published in previous works, revised and rewritten for this book (Iparraguirre, 2017, 2019).

39

Cultural Rhythmics

40

Argentina enables us to clearly visualise the intrinsic connection between the production rhythmics and the imaginaries of development, centred on a logic of urgent results. The fourth case focuses on politics in Argentina, as a group of decision-makers, comprising municipal, provincial and national officials working in the province of Buenos Aires. The analysis of this case is complemented in Chapter 4 with a detailed study of different development agendas.

3.1 CULTURAL HERITAGE The first case study presented in this work is the cultural heritage of Ventania, which forms a paradigmatic process for dealing with the symbolic and factual relationships between the imaginary matrix ‘heritage’, cultural and natural resources, territory, the construction of past and history, and local territorial development policies. As mentioned in the Introduction, from my personal experience of having worked in cultural heritage research and management between 2006 and 2010, two field sites were systematised, prompting reflection on the ethnographic practice of fieldwork and my professional work as an anthropologist in relation to the management of this cultural heritage. The first field site is centred on a protected natural area, the ‘Ernesto Tornquist’ Provincial Park (PPET). This park is located in the Ventania Hill System, district of Tornquist, and has an area of 6,700 hectares. Founded on 1937, its main mission is the conservation of natural heritage, which includes its geological and palaeontological heritage, the Pampas grassland ecosystem, water basins and streams (tributaries of the Sauce Grande River), the main source of water supply for the city of Bah´ıa Blanca. Cerro de la Ventana, its main touristic attraction, was declared a provincial natural monument in 1959. More than half of the plant communities that make up the Pampean biodiversity are represented in the PPET, including species not protected in any other natural preservation area, some of which have practically disappeared in the rest of the region, and the park also comprises an unusual concentration of species that only exist there (Zalba & Villamil, 2002). These characteristics make this protected area the most valuable biodiversity conservation unit in the entire Argentinian Pampa Biome (Kristensen & Frangi, 1995). The second field site of this case focused on the management of the archaeological and palaeontological heritage by a provincial heritage observatory where I worked between 2008 and 2010, after being offered to coordinate

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

41

one of the provincial organisation’s headquarters in the southwest region which covered 10 districts. The purpose of this observatory was to generate close ties with local communities, so as to end ‘with the disarticulation and barriers that often make it difficult to carry out activities of protection, research, dissemination and the transfer of cultural heritage’ (Iparraguirre, 2017, p. 108). The initial axes of reflection and questions around which this case was built were based on both experiences mentioned: How does cultural heritage allow us to think about territory and its different valuations, manifested in the imaginaries that the inhabitants of a territory have? How is it possible to translate these heritage values into research, management and development practices in the territory? How do we access the social groups’ representations of cultural heritage in order to develop efficient management policies? How is it possible to intervene in the management of the same cultural heritage by different social groups? In this direction, I set out to collect various experiences of cultural management in the territory, to study specific data and processes that would allow me to answer these questions and analyse how to generate suitable conceptual and methodological tools that can be applied to this region.

3.1.1 Cultural Heritage Imaginaries This case study was systematised for analysis, based on three specific constellations of imaginaries (patrimonial, political and scientific), as a way of systematically accessing what symbolic representations the aforementioned social groups refer to when they manifest the categories that make up the imaginaries in their speeches. Some of these categories are: heritage, resources, culture, nature, territory, development, dissemination, conservation, research and science, among others (Fig. 3). It is important to note that these analysis matrices, which link constellations of imaginaries with their recurring components and categories, are the result of experimentation and constant permutation, addition and removal, until obtaining a useful matrix of meaning for the interpretation of discourses and their correlation with practices. These matrices are, to use a classic image of scientific activity, the final form of the ‘test tubes’ that I used to analyse the symbolic material of the field, and to ‘synthesise’ these materials until I achieved the new ones, those that combine the raw material (the voice of the interlocutors) with the interpretations that I gave them.

Cultural Rhythmics

42

Social Imaginaries Constellation

Components Identity

Cultural resources Heritage

Natural resources

Territory

Cultural heritage Politics State

Development

Research Science Education Knowledge

Categories Tradition, family, customs, transmission of knowledge. Tangible and intangible human productions. Conservation. Biomes, flora, and fauna (native and exotic). Biodiversity. Access to natural cultural surroundings and contexts. Landscape configuration. Tourist and agricultural territories. Interventions at Municipal, Provincial and National level. Tensions between public and private sectors. Patrimony laws. Touristic, scientific, educational, and industrial use. Ideas regarding science, legitimacy of discourses, truth criteria. Dissemination, distribution, extension. Wisdom, training, qualification.

Fig. 3. Analysis Matrix of Social Imaginaries About Cultural Heritage.

The symbolic components of each one of these constellations were traced during the fieldwork, based on the emergence of the imaginaries’ constitutive categories in most of the field records, and based on subsequent reformulations that the analysis allowed me to visualise more clearly. In this sense, the constellation of heritage imaginaries is made up of identity, cultural resources and natural resources. The categories for the Identity component are: tradition, family, customs and transmission of knowledge. For the cultural resources component, the categories are: tangible and intangible human productions, and conservation. For the natural resources component, the categories are: biomes, flora and fauna (native and exotic) and biodiversity. This tension between the components ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ to classify resources appears complementarily, since one’s symbolic position defines the other by diametric opposition. In all the interviews – whether it was with the biologists,

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

43

the park rangers, the tour guides or the groups of tourists – we registered the reference to objects as ‘cultural’ when they were not natural, and the concept of ‘what is natural’ as that which is not cultural. ‘The natural’ is associated with ‘biome’, ‘flora’, ‘fauna’ and ‘biodiversity’ and is revealed in images as the ‘native–exotic’, ‘authentic–intervened’ and ‘clean–polluted’ dualities. ‘The cultural’ is associated with human activity in general, highlighting ‘the indigenous’, the ‘architectural’, ‘customs and beliefs’, ‘agriculture’, the ‘agricultural’ and any modification of the geographical landscape and any alteration of the biome that should occur without human intervention. This manifest polarisation, among the natural protected area interlocutors as well as among officials, has its historical and epistemological roots in modernity: The conception of natural spaces, indebted to nineteenth-century thought, is based on Western construction itself, which establishes nature and culture as independent domains - dichotomous and differentiated - […] And, perhaps, the expression ‘natural park’ synthesizes the contradiction that this division of worlds implies and is revealing of the way in which we have historically drawn the concept of nature as an external domain. (Santamarina Campos, 2012, p. 27) Likewise, as studies from symmetrical anthropology have already formu´ lated (Gonzalez-Ruibal, 2007; Latour, 2007), it is more epistemologically precise to speak of natures-cultures when working with ‘quasi-objects’ or ‘quasi-humans’ hybrids such as those manifested in the images and texts just mentioned: ‘scientific facts are constructed but cannot be reduced to the social because it is populated by mobilized objects to build it’ (Latour, 2007, p. 22). By dissociating the objects–things that identify the heritage from the subjects that mobilise them and re-signify them in their interpretations and management, asymmetric relationships are established that reproduce the polarisation between ‘expert knowledge’ and ‘amateur knowledge’. Precisely, the ‘science’ constellation has a symbolic position that legitimises what should or should not be heritage, depending on the ‘scientific status’ of the voice that recognises it as such, and depending on whether it is positioned further from what is strictly natural or closer to what is obviously cultural. The constellation of scientific imaginaries has recurrent components: research, education and knowledge. The main categories of the research component are scientific ideas, legitimacy of discourses and criteria of truth. For the education component, the following stand out: disclosure, dissemination

44

Cultural Rhythmics

and extension. And for knowledge, the categories are experience, education and training. The different modes of expression of the scientific imaginary surrounding cultural heritage are manifested in research practices (condensed mainly in the academic field), in educational practices (relegated to the pedagogical field or informal transfer) and in the generation of ‘patrimonial knowledge’ in general, which is usually reproduced both in the academic spheres of extension (congresses and conferences) and in journalistic media. Regarding the constellation of political imaginaries, at least three components can be distinguished, which of course can overlap with some of those already mentioned: territory, state and development. The categories for territory are environments and natural-cultural areas, landscapes and tourist territories. For the state, the typical categories are interventions at municipal, provincial, national and international level; as well as the tensions between public and private sectors. For development, the categories are grouped as touristic, scientific and educational uses of resources. The overlapping of meanings is clearly visualised in the notion of ‘landscape’, since it includes the symmetry between nature and culture that is distinguished between natural and cultural resources, especially when associated with touristic territories – picturesque landscape, beautiful landscape – or with productive environments, such as the landscape of a cornfield or the landscape of cattle in the field. In its political dimension, the territory in terms of heritage is complemented by state interventions – legislation, regulations, rescue and management procedures – and the representations of development that imply the use of heritage, as a touristic, scientific or educational resource. In a complementary way, patrimonial imaginaries, as well as scientific and political ones, can be interpreted as symbolic fields constituted by their respective capitals, such as the scientific, the political, the economic and the legal, among others (Bourdieu, 2008). In short, a heritage imaginary can be defined as the set of representations about ‘heritage’ that a social group share based on the articulation of symbolic components and associated categories of knowledge. These symbolic components group the recurring meanings that social agents attribute to the categories used to interpret and interact with ‘heritage’. The same can be applied to define scientific imaginaries, by grouping symbolic representations about ‘science’, and to political imaginaries, by grouping symbolic representations about ‘politics’. 3.1.2 Scientific Political Management of Heritage The discussion raised throughout this case on the identification of patrimonial, political and scientific imaginaries revolves, on an underlying level, around the

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

45

split between science and politics: between knowing and doing, between the production and reproduction of knowledge, and between its technical genesis and the didactic transposition to other languages. Likewise, it sets anthropology’s current place around these polarities and the importance of reflecting on the professional-labour practice linked to the different modes of activation of cultural heritage (Prats, 2004), to the pragmatic application of ethnographic tools (Escobar, 2012; Greenwood, 2000; Isla, 2014; Isla & Colmegna, 2005; ´ Mastrangelo, D´ıaz Galan, Carolina, & Paula, 2013), as well as the socio-political position assumed by the different social actors involved (Garc´ıa Canclini, 2008, 2022; Hodder, 2008). Identifying heritage imaginaries allows recognising the interests and motivations that exist around a certain heritage resource, and therefore, being able to diagnose possible forms of intervention and communication between those who interact within heritage management in different social spaces. In the study of the two field sites, the symbolic representations of the discovery, management and dissemination of cultural heritage were analysed as a way to access the imaginaries that sustain the practices and discourses around it. It was also sought to contextualise these imaginaries in the conceptual framework of the symbolic fields and, in particular, in the intersection of the political and scientific fields, incorporating theoretical approaches such as those of Bourdieu and Latour into the analysis. The first states that ‘scientific fields are the domain of two forms of power corresponding to two species of scientific capital’, which are temporal or political, institutional power and specific power, personal prestige (Bourdieu, 2008, p. 89), while the second formulates that ‘in order to fully understand the relationship between science and politics, one must first free oneself from controversial definitions of scientific activity’ (Latour, 2012, p. 99). Both in the first and second field sites, the difficulties the interlocutors had in agreeing on the correct form of management for cultural heritage originated from the confrontation of imaginaries regarding what should be done in terms of scientific activities and how it should be operated in the different symbolic fields – usually called ‘action plans’ – of heritage management: political, scientific, communicative and educational. Particularly in the scientific field, it was possible to recognise in both cases the two forms of power pointed out by Bourdieu that break into individual behaviour within groups: institutionalised political power – provincial entities, municipalities, museums – and the specific power of the personal prestige – officials, technicians, researchers. In this direction, the dialectical relationship between an ethnography of imaginaries that articulates symbolic fields involved in power relations gives theoretical–methodological support to the study of the symbolic dimension of

46

Cultural Rhythmics

cultural heritage, since it organises a vast amount of ethnographic information and manages to implement a model of management. This is feasible if social imaginaries are considered a network of multiple meanings that are manifested in the symbolic fields that give them their origin, at the same time that they are traversed by them and extend their scope beyond the limits of each field, be it political, scientific, patrimonial, economic or other. This decoding of the system of meanings in the network allows us to comprehensively visualise the position occupied by social actors within the fields that challenge them, while offering us guidelines on how to address the process of intercommunication between social groups and their partial interests. However, it also leads us to formulate new questions at the level of action, anthropological management and action research as Greenwood calls it; how are these imaginary frameworks approached? Who can and should do it? What are the stages of an integral work that considers the imaginaries of the social actors surrounding a patrimonial activation? How is it feasible to articulate the investigation of imaginaries, fieldwork, cultural management and its political implications? From an anthropological perspective focused on an ethnography of social imaginaries, every social fact can be analysed systematically, following a study method that allows its socio-cultural components to be interpreted, and from there, to build theoretical–experimental models that account for the symbolic matter and material on which the actions of subjects and social groups are based. In a similar way, the application of this ethnographic practice in various social spaces should not be restricted to situations of spatial distance, strangeness or exoticism (Clifford, 1999, p. 77), since it can be practised and experienced, within the anthropologist’s own society and in areas in which the same, in certain cases, is an active actor and subject of self-reflection (Greenwood, 2000; Iparraguirre, 2011; Latour, 2007). Recapitulating the tradition of symbolic anthropology mentioned in Chapter 1, as well as the current vision of ethnographic criticism, it can be emphasised that the field places, and the recognition of the imaginaries that define them, are imbricated in the ethnographic practice: ‘there is a key dialectical relationship between the places where we work and the class of subjects that such practice produces’ (Wright, 2005, p. 55). In this direction, I maintain the argument that ethnography allows first-hand access to the social representations of the actors involved in a tangible or intangible heritage activation (Prats, 2004; Santamarina Campos, 2012). Also, in accordance with Greenwood’s approach to action research, it is a priority that social research such as the one proposed here be ‘developed through collaboration between a professional researcher and the “owners of the problem” in a local organization, an intentional community or group created for a specific purpose’ (Greenwood, 2000, p. 32).

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

47

Likewise, the exercise of an ethnography of imaginaries open to incorporating investigative practices such as multi-vocality (Hodder, 2008) and action research allows the construction of a notion of social heritage that transcends the officials and researchers on duty, and that demands the implementation of new research and preservation policies that integrate the patrimonial imaginaries of the local inhabitants. This is a priority when designing and exercising heritage management policies, according to the fact that ‘all cultural policy is a policy with the imaginaries that make us believe that we are similar’ (Garc´ıa Canclini, 2008, p. 107). In other words, cultural policy must include, firstly, all forms of politics, not only those which say something about culture, but also politics themselves, the acts of representing and being represented. In turn, if culture as a whole is the first form of representation between subjects, its political praxis must account for the dynamics of identification between groups, either due to their differentiation from others, or those that are not one, or as one. Thus, managing these politics with the imaginary-others is managing difference and similarity, closeness and distance – as L´evi-Strauss liked to point out. Garc´ıa Canclini completes his idea with a key factor: At the same time, it is a policy with what we cannot imagine of others, to see if it is possible to reconcile the differences: how to live with those who do not speak my language correctly, [who] allow women to go without a veil (or have), [that] do not accept the values of hegemonic religion or scientific rationality, [that] reject hierarchies or seek to subsume them in democratic horizontality. (Garc´ıa Canclini, 2008, p. 107) What we cannot imagine of others is completed in the same way: with the belief in similarity, with the nuanced approaches, with the statistical semantics that re-constructs the other in proportional pieces, in averaged halves and in tangential approximations to what the other is believed to be. The author narrates it precisely by stating that it is a politics with imaginaries, and not with people, with political parties, or with institutions. Cultural policy is given, conceived and practised from the imaginary, through its symbolic material, and for this reason, it is key to know how to recognise them and put them into participatory communication. 3.1.3 Heritage Inter vention Model Entering in the conclusions of this case, based on the results of this ethnographic research, I can affirm that the inefficiency or failure of the

48

Cultural Rhythmics

implementation of scientific practices and policies of management, research and dissemination around cultural heritage responds directly to the ignorance of the patrimonial, political and scientific imaginaries that exist among all the social groups involved when giving meanings to resources, as well as in decision-making instances. Likewise, these other factors can be internalised by social actors in situations of ‘negotiation’ and conflict of interests, if the obstacle exerted by power groups in the demarcation between science, on the one hand, and politics, on the other, is understood (Latour, 2012, p. 157). The author explains that in order to transcend the dichotomy that continues to divide scientists from politicians, it is necessary to think and discuss controversies together – in this case, patrimonial –, instead of continuing to treat them separately, reproducing this factor of separability that leads to a non-communication between groups in permanent controversy and in permanent demarcation of the spheres of concern of one and the other. The experience of having worked in cultural heritage management in the provincial entity that grants research permits on the one hand, and the direct relationship with interested local researchers and residents, on the other (Iparraguirre, 2011), has allowed me to build a critical perspective of the political-scientific conflicts that cross the cultural heritage of Ventania, a place where, in addition to researching as a social anthropologist, I live, and therefore interact with the people involved in the daily social dynamics around it. Likewise, reconsidering the aforementioned perspective of Latour (2007), this type of conflict has a symmetric nature of natural-cultural components, where it is not feasible to definitively separate a decision that is made from a political sphere, from one made from a social sphere, and where there is no a ´ priori division between humans and objects (Gonzalez-Ruibal, 2007). In this sense, a symmetrical management strategy requires the intervention with political and scientific decisions agreed upon by the different participating actors, so that reaching extreme and urgent instances is not necessary, as has already happened in other regions of Argentina. For example, in the Province of ´ there is another case of archaeological heritage with similar characTucuman, teristics: ‘Symbol of identity of Taf´ı del Valle: the menhirs. These stones were manipulated according to political circumstances, from that perspective they ´ were removed from their original locations’ (Garc´ıa Azcarate & Ribotta, 2007, p. 370). Ventania has a particular set of imaginaries in relation to the archaeological heritage as a result of the existence of more than 200 menhirs distributed in different sectors of the mountains (Iparraguirre, 2017, pp. 129–136). This case also leads us to rethink, in the case of Ventania, the state of the relationship between researchers from different disciplines, politicians, officials

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

49

and local residents, and how their different imaginaries are articulated when managing and investigating cultural heritage. A central aspect for the preservation of these structures, which emerges from the ethnography of heritage imaginaries carried out, is the consensus that must be built between owners of the fields where they are located and researchers who are interested in studying them. But this consensus is not achieved exclusively by exercising the legal mandate in order to investigate the area (through permits), or by organising training sessions on general issues and consulting with surveys ‘what people think’ of the stones. This approach is asymmetrical towards the degree of participation of the local community, whether indigenous, criollo or another, with an evident unequivocal tendency. The consensus must be reached in a participatory and multi-vocal way (Hodder, 2008), allowing the local community to periodically evaluate the content of the investigations and their impact on common interests: articles and dissemination documents, audio-visual material, school material, tourist information, activities recreational and artistic, among others. In this sense, it is highlighted here that one of the main difficulties in managing cultural heritage in Ventania – and in Argentina in general –, is the shortcoming of the current legislation that regulates archaeological research permits at national and provincial levels (Ley 25.743, 2006), regarding the lack of control over the information generated, its corresponding extension to the community, and the characteristics of the permit granted (duration, exclusive area, rights, restrictions). This law, passed in 2003, is generally aimed at regulating research activities among researchers and their responsibility towards the State, but ignores the intrinsic relationship between researchers and the local population that interacts daily with the heritage (fans, teachers, owners of the fields, and other actors already mentioned). That is, if the legislation really focused on regulating the production of knowledge, the conservation of resources and the identification of the local community with that knowledge–resource, political-scientific aspects could be suggested, based on ethnographic work, to take into account questions such as: How does the local community know if an investigation in its region is moving forward or not, if it is relevant or not, if the information is protected or not? Is it an exclusive power of the public entity to control this relationship between permission granted and scientific production? What happens in cases in which officials and investigators overlap in a double role of having to investigate and having to control what is investigated? How do these conflicting interests affect the generation of new knowledge and new discussions? What are the rights of the local community in regards to accessing cultural resources and information produced from the academic field? These, and other questions

Cultural Rhythmics

50

that could be added, could be considered when re-signifying scientific and technical practice in the face of findings, exhibitions and dissemination in general, which completes the cycle of communication between cultural resources, the knowledge that is generated, and the local social appropriation that is made of the entire process. In this sense, a concrete proposal that emerges from this work is the essential implementation of ethnographic studies in the local community that participates in a heritage endeavour, which integrates mapping into ethnographic practice, the cartography of the imaginaries of the political authorities involved, as well as those of the intervening scientific community. This allows clarity in regard to the tense imaginaries of all these social actors, in order to have precise tools when intervening, and that can be applied together with the necessary methodologies for each phase of the process – whether they are archaeological, palaeontological, rescue, management, conservation, dissemination, the drafting of ordinances, the signing of inter-institutional agreements – among others. Fig. 4 presents a preliminary model of intervention, based on the theoretical development and the experience in the field presented throughout this work. Starting from the initial concern of managing and investigating cultural heritage among different social groups that are located in different positions of power in the studied territory, the model proposes outlining the modes of intervention after building and systematising the heritage field, which previously requires the recognition of social imaginaries among the social groups involved. In this way, the intervention process in a heritage activation in a specific territory requires four phases that start sequentially, although all of them remain active until the end of the process. Phase one involves ethnographic work on the imaginaries and rhythms of the intervening groups and actors, which allows for the identification and diagnosis of social groups. At

PHASE 1: Imaginaries ethnography Social group identification. Recognizing each group’s imaginaries. Diagnosis.

PHASE 2: Technical teams Technical team’s imaginaries. Planning. Action guidelines. Research. Management. Dissemination.

PHASE 3: Patrimonial field Scientific field. Political field. Economic field. Legal field. Political-scientific cartography.

Fig. 4. Heritage Intervention Model.

PHASE 4: Intervention modes

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

51

the same time, phase two is being worked on, together with the technical teams in instances of planning, investigation, management and dissemination. Phase three activates the recognition and synchronous reading of the symbolic fields that question the praxis of each activity of the previous phases – scientific, political, economic and legal field. These, analysed from the perspective of the imaginaries, give a concrete reference of how the patrimonial field that operates in the symbolic plane of all the social groups affected by the process is constructed, along with the entire empirical process. Finally, phase four contains the modes of intervention that must necessarily be the result of putting the three previous phases into action, applied as already mentioned, to the heritage activation in question, and in a specific territory. As Greenwood put it several years ago, the ‘validity’ of these results must be confirmed in action, and not just ‘through the approval of academic colleagues’ (2000, p. 47). These modes of intervention are the responses in decision-making and the operational technical solutions that the model must be able to explain with a view to efficient, sustainable and multi-vocal management of cultural heritage. By way of concluding this section, I would like to bring up an old reflection raised by anthropology since the beginning of the field: unless they are forced to, communities do not forget. The cultural resources present in Ventania, along with the multiplicity of mapped interpretations and the diversity of social imaginaries that they manifest, are already a social heritage that transcends officials and researchers, and for this reason, it is necessary to implement new research and preservation policies that respond to the concerns of local people and that encourage new researchers to work in the region. As will be discussed in the next section, the same applies to rural tourism, insofar as a cultural or natural resource is activated by transforming it into a service, by intervening in the territory with processes of tourist heritage, and can be applied to agricultural production if it is conceived that the enhancement of the territory where food is produced is also a patrimonialisation from which identity processes are built (family, roots, traditions, among others). Heritage management, whether in its generic form as ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, or applied to development dynamics, as is the case of touristic heritage, requires knowing how communities represent such heritage.

3.2 TOURISM The initial questions that motivated and guided this case study revolve around the concern for why touristic providers forged in the ‘same’ territory and cultural context behave in very different ways and have conflicting conceptions

52

Cultural Rhythmics

about how tourism should be practised, about the ethos of the touristic provider and particularly about how it is possible for tourism to participate in ‘local development’. Are we truly observing one cultural context that can be reduced to one territory and that forges social actors with a certain homogeneity? If so, how are the great difficulties in achieving communication and associative working styles observed in fieldwork explained? What do providers represent by the concept of ‘development’? Is it a univocal concept? The empirical material that supports the case is based on experiences of management and research in rural tourism carried out between 2009 and 2014, as a result of my work as promoter–advisor of two rural change groups of rural tourism in National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA). During these five years, I systematised imaginaries present in the implementation of rural tourism in the territory, done so by the tourism providers’ part of INTA associative groups, these groups’ technical advisors and other professionals linked to the institution. Work was also carried out with the different social groups identified with the development of tourism in the region called ‘Sierras de la Ventana’ tourist district. The sum of interlocutors with whom I interacted in this case, counting guided and semi-guided interviews and different instances of dialogue, exceeds 80 people. The activities and services offered by the providers of both groups are: guided walks and trekking, vehicle safari rides within the field, 4 3 4 adventure tourism, horseback riding, gastronomic services for events in the country side, accommodation in the field, handmade chocolates, winery and wine production, an artisanal confectionery, a dairy and cheese factory, historical-cultural tourism, lodging for groups, a sausage factory and pig farming, a rural tourist complex, aromatic production, an artisanal pastry shop and a bar restaurant. In principle, it may be useful to introduce the problem and to review the classic anthropological dilemma of ‘us and the others’, which without having to articulate it with comparisons between ethnic groups or between nationalities can be easily found within the ‘bonaerense’ (from the province of Buenos Aires) or ‘Argentinean’ categories, through a pluri-cultural framework that transcends the cohesive elements such as ‘same education’, ‘same city or town’, ‘same life story’, ‘same commercial activity’ and ‘same tourist interest’. The sameness within the rural tourism groups studied is absolutely diverse, not only because of the different activities that each one undertakes, but also because the touristic rhythm that each one carries out is penetrated by different rhythms of life. So, what is the answer when providers of the same tourist ‘niche’ establish different conceptions about the tourist practice to the point of not being able to

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

53

establish joint or complementary ways of working? What conditions these rhythms of life in such a way that they become irreconcilable stances? Is it the influence of globalisation that infiltrates practices from other cultures into the home environment, and is it in the overlapping of media and ideologies where we see this ‘hybrid culture’ appear, isolating ‘the similar’? Attempting to answer these questions, which combine otherness within a supposed homogeneity, is the purpose that guides this case. 3.2.1 Imaginaries of Rural Tourism As Fig. 5 summarises, the study of the social imaginaries around rural tourism in the southwest of Buenos Aires Province was analysed from the emergence, during fieldwork, of three recurring concepts, classified as constellations of imaginaries: development, territory and heritage. From the identification and analysis of this set of constellations, components and categories, the interpretation of the field of representations about rural tourism was organised, which allowed characterising the discourses of the interlocutors, in parallel with the ethnographic observation of the touristic practices that they carried out in their daily practice. The final format of this matrix is the result of experimenting with the field material until reaching an effective and precise analytical tool. In the scheme of the social imaginaries studied in this case, the development constellation groups three symbolic components: state, market and countryside. The state component groups political interventions at municipal, provincial and national level; tensions between public and private sectors; heritage laws; and the regulations of the tourist operation. The market component includes the circuits of marketing, sale and consumption of services and products; the logic of supply and demand; and the notions of leisure, travel and vacations. And the countryside component refers to the productive area to be developed with agricultural and tourist activities; it is an economic business. The territory constellation groups the management, countryside and place components. The management component includes associativism, value chains and tourism products and services; and local development (here ‘development’ operates as a category and not as a component). The countryside component acquires different meanings here, as it is associated with the land, nature and the mountains; it is the rural area, where rurality has its place; it refers to the life of the countryside, in the interior of the country or in open spaces. The place component integrates the construction of tourist places; the identification of traits and attributes, as well as natural and cultural environments; the conception of rural or urban places (rurality and urbanity).

Cultural Rhythmics

54

Social imaginaries

Constellation

Components

State

Development Market

Countryside

Management

Territory

Countryside

Rural tourism Lugar

Cultural resources

Patrimony Natural resources

Sustainability

Categories Policy at Municipal, Provincial, and National level. and private sectors. Patrimony law. Touristic “exploitation” norms. Channels for commercialization, sales, and consumption of products and services. Supply and demand. Leisure, travel, vacation. Productive field, in development. Economic business. Associativism Value chains Touristic products and services Local development Land, nature, mountains. Rural field, agriculture and livestock. Country life (inland, not domestic) Touristic places. Characteristics and natural attributes Natural cultural surroundings. Local and rural areas. Rurality and urban ness. Tangible resources (artisanal manufactures, architecture, museums, collections, archaeologic and palaeontological sites). Intangible resources (identity, local history, traditions, families, knowledge, lore). Cultural landscapes. Celestial and climatic events. Biodiversity, biosphere, flora, fauna. Geology, geography, natural landscapes. Ecological use of resources, economic sustenance and social equity. Sustainability

Fig. 5. Analysis Matrix of Social Imaginaries About Rural Tourism.

The notion of place in the multidisciplinary field of tourism, like that of territory, has been used in multiple ways and has varied with the different economic, geographic, sociological and anthropological theoretical frameworks. Traditional perspectives assume the existence of tourist places based on the description of their distinctive features, such as attractions, equipment and

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

55

‘territorial configurations’ (Bertoncello, 2006, p. 333). That is, places become touristic if they meet the requirements of the analytical perspective that weighs them. The notion of place in these cases, its spatiality, implies the notion of a physical space with attributions and additions that must become attractive. In the specific case of tourist territory, this concept has been considered as a mere place where tourism happens, decontextualised from the social order (Bertoncello, 2006, p. 333). As a replacement, Bertoncello proposes the notion of ‘tourist map’ to define the set of tourist destination places in the national territory, for which it is necessary to ‘recognize which are the specific attributes of the places that, converted into tourist attractions, define their condition of tourist destinations’ (Bertoncello, 2006, p. 318). In this sense, the spatiality assigned to the concept of place acquires a social dimension that extends beyond the attributes and includes the intervening social actors. The distinction and correlation of attractive concepts, resources and features is important to understand the processes of differentiation and characterisation of places that can become touristic: ‘the territory of tourism is the result of a social dynamic that places the valuing of differentiation of places at its core’ (Bertoncello, 2002, p. 42). A tourist destination is characterised by having features and qualities that are valued as an attribute if they coincide with visitors’ demands. The attractions are not absolute attributes of the place, but are built in this process of valuing and acceptance, where the attractions in turn acquire the character of a tourist resource, feasible to be used commercially (Bertoncello, 2002, pp. 42–43). The product and the service, finally, are the ways in which the attractions are presented to the tourist. The heritage constellation groups the cultural resources, natural resources and sustainability components. The cultural resources component groups together tangible resources (crafts, architecture, museums, collections, archaeological and palaeontological records); intangible resources (identity, local history, traditions, families, knowledge, legends); and cultural landscapes. The natural resources component integrates celestial and climatic phenomena; biodiversity, biosphere, flora, fauna; geology, geography and natural landscapes. The sustainability component integrates the ecological use of resources; economic sustenance and social equity; and sustainability. The usefulness of an anthropological study on tourism such as the one proposed, can be aligned as a contribution to the call of specialist authors such ´ by saying that ‘the study of the articulation as Daniel Hiernaux-Nicolas, between ideas and imaginaries, which derives in models, should be a central task of the social sciences, to prevent tourism analysis from being limited to a ´ simple positivist account of its successes or failures’ (Hiernaux-Nicolas,

56

Cultural Rhythmics

2002b, p. 33); or to understand the intensive growth of tourism and the possible course that it will follow in the face of societal changes in recent ´ 2002a, p. 27). It is also a way of exploring those decades (Hiernaux-Nicolas, imaginaries of modernism and economism that drag hegemonic studies on tourism, to analyse their components and denaturalise them, which requires, first of all, recognising that ‘it is in the articulation of tourism with the broader social context where it will be possible to advance in its understanding’ (Bertoncello, 2002, p. 32). Although there are precedents in the application of the study of imaginaries ´ (2002b), to tourism, such as the recently mentioned case of Hiernaux-Nicolas it is instructive to clarify the difference between the two approaches. The author proposes four ideologies around which the concept of ‘tourism imaginary’ is built in Western society to understand the ‘societal ideologies that have triggered a phenomenon of such magnitude as mass tourism, capable of ´ 2002b p. 8). It disrupting global mobility on a large scale’ (Hiernaux-Nicolas, defines the ideological concept as a value system and identifies four specific ideals in the forming of tourist imaginaries: ‘the conquest of happiness, the desire to escape, the discovery of the other and the return to nature’ (Hier´ 2002b, p. 9). The tourist imaginary of Western societies is naux-Nicolas, constructed from the synthesis of these four ideologies, interpreted as an apparatus or system independent of other cognitive functions, for example, ´ states ‘the imaginary also resorts to the constructions when Hiernaux-Nicolas of representation, constructions sustained by imagination, dreams, individual ´ 2002b, p. 9). or collective fantasy’ (Hiernaux-Nicolas, I understand that social imaginaries – and not the imaginary – do not resort to representations as they are precisely symbolic representations of the life of the subject. Here, maintaining the idea that imaginaries are necessarily social is important, even though we know that their minimum unit is the cultural imagination that each subject produces and reproduces. Although Hiernaux proposes a ‘social imaginary’, formulated on a group scale, within which the tourist imaginary exists as a portion, his analysis explores ‘the subjective dimension of the tourist act through the creation of its imaginaries’ (Hiernaux´ 2002b, p. 33) and his theory suggests a single imaginary that brings Nicolas, together all these possible subjective imaginaries, such as ‘mass tourism’ ´ 2002b, p. 8) or the ‘tourist imaginary typical of Western (Hiernaux-Nicolas, ´ 2002b, p. 12). societies’ (Hiernaux-Nicolas, Can we state that there is a single touristic imaginary for every subject that is positioned within Western society? Where does Western society begin and where does it end, when trying to discern if one is inside or outside, and in this context, if one aligns or not with that representation of the tourist field? The

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

57

socio-cultural, economic-political and ideological breadth that coexists within the ‘West’ is so vast that it is impossible to sustain the West as an analytical category. This is the problem with positioning symbolic fields in physical places, although it is understood that the West is not exclusively the left hemisphere of the planisphere, west of the Greenwich meridian. Social imaginaries are interpreted here as constitutive of symbolic fields, in the sense formulated by Bourdieu (2008), according to the positioning they exercise in social ‘spaces’, and as socio-political constructs, they can be precisely characterised in terms of power relations: hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, subaltern, original, native, among others. Thus, we can state that there are social imaginaries about tourism that are obviously hegemonic, such as the one promoted, for example, by VISA in credit card summaries under the slogan (in Argentina): ‘you live in this world, you need Visa’. Although this message is not explicitly associated to tourism, with ‘the numerous manifestations of the societal process of traveling’ as Hiernaux (2002b, p. 8) defines it, its subliminal meaning points to the fact that ‘the world’ is the orb of consumption which VISA gives you access to and that any practice associated with ‘tourism’ will need, sooner or later, the services of a credit card that is hegemonic due to its global expansion and its ubiquitous position within the financial markets. Having mentioned this example, I cannot leave aside MasterCard, the credit card company that hegemonises the other half – if they are different halves – of the financial-finance tourism market. In this case, the motto is: ‘there are certain things that money cannot buy, for everything else there is MasterCard’. Here the totality is implicit in the ‘everything’, which supposes a homogeneous universe that one can access, which is precisely the global consumer market. The dynamics of rural tourism can be understood as an alternative to tourism circuits that are purely consumerist (casinos) or extremely virtual (internet travel portals), with a tendency to re-encounter materiality and with the tangibility of the product being purchased and consumed. In rural tourism, in a dairy farm like the one in Campo Udi, for example, you can get close to the cows, watch them milk, buy the cheese, eat it and complete the cycle of re-signification that unites the money set aside for tourism, with the feeling of having spent it in a real, factual, experiential way. This can complement the ideology of the ‘return to nature’ that Hiernaux proposes, linked to a contemplation of vacations as a palliative phase to the degradation of daily life, full of canned goods, chemicals and polluted environments, from the end ´ 2002b, pp. 25–26). of the 1960s (Hiernaux-Nicolas, Santana Talavera refers to the relationship between tourism and rhythms of life with a similar approach:

58

Cultural Rhythmics

John Swarbrooke, referring to rural tourism in Europe, exposes a series of characteristics that I think are applicable, with slight nuances, to the type of cultural tourist described. The author indicates that they are distinguished by: (1) nostalgia for traditional culture and ways of life, (2) expression of the desire to temporarily become part of the local community, (3) their desire to learn more about of the past and present life of the area, (4) their preference not to mingle with other tourists and (5) their belief that the areas visited represent a leisurely and simple rhythm of life, in contrast to the cities. (Santana Talavera, 2002, p. 11) The representation of a ‘slow and simple rhythm of life’ associated with the countryside and small towns, in contrast to the rhythm of the city, is one of the patterns manifested by tourists who visit the region, for example, when they ask in the middle of a walk: ‘what do you live for here, how can you live so calmly?’. Applying the methodology, then, it is possible to amplify the explanatory value of social imaginaries if we analyse, in the set of the aforementioned constellations, the conformation of cultural rhythms based on the articulation of tourist practices and the rhythms of life. I remark that the specific hypothesis that guides this case proposes that rural tourism, understood as an integrating social fact of attractions, places, actors, resources and heritage, can not only be characterised, diagnosed and analysed by its physical, territorial, political, economic, financial and social conditions but also by the rhythmic experiences that are put into play between visitors and hosts, by the search for a change of pace. Below, I display the cultural rhythms identified in the rural tourism praxis in correlation with social imaginaries and their comprehensive and explanatory utility of the socio-territorial dynamics of tourism. Two large sets of rhythms are distinguished responding basically to two social processes typical in the tourism practice in general, which resonates in the host–visitor polarity: the rhythms of touristic management and the rhythms of leisure.

3.2.2 Rhythmics of Touristic Management Between both groups, I held a total of 83 meetings between October 2009 and September 2014, each of which had a planning scheme and agenda prior to the meeting and a subsequent report detailing the activities and topics discussed, in

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

59

addition to the activities carried out in the agency or in other locations during the corresponding month. Each meeting entails a challenging encounter of socialisation and sharing, of confrontation of perspectives and results, of commercial and family plans, and of municipal, tourist and economic situations. During those three to four hours, a recount of what happened during a whole month is condensed. For the farmers, it is still a burden to attend, having to pause their work to go to the scheduled place, but at the same time, they feel it as an emotional relief, a moment of relaxation and group reflection. My experience with setting up monthly meetings gave me a sense of convening the producers and generating a dialogue that goes beyond the formality required by the programme. In fact, more meetings were held than those foreseen by the calendar. Even during certain times of the year when it is inconvenient to meet, no one misses the meetings; they all agree that they are a priority, and if someone cannot prioritise them, it makes no sense for that person to remain a member of the group. In fact, throughout the process, there were initial providers who chose not to continue participating and others who joined after the first year. Knowing one another is the motive for getting together and listening to each other. Collaboration emerges in meetings, not from an interest in marketing together but as an imaginary of the potential the group has in the face of the individual’s fragility. Now, what does it mean to meet? What social fact is built in this habitus of sharing voice and ideas? I understand that the periodic rhythm that implies getting together once a month, for four years, generates a resonance of a larger cycle, a ‘socio-seasonal’ rhythm, in which it is possible to interpret the dynamics of the group in relation to other rhythms, such as the climate and the seasonality of the commercial tourist rhythm (high and low seasons, holidays, vacations). Thus, it is possible to find recurrences and pulses of group work. In summer, for example, the meetings are relaxed, it is difficult to get together and the attention is set on the visitor (therefore on individual interests). It is a high season, and the main priority is working intensively to face the low season that autumn will bring. By lowering the demand for work, it is possible to pay attention to planning and collaborative work; it is synergistic to get together and share experiences, discuss common problems and evaluate the results obtained in comparison to others. In the peaks of visits between autumn and spring, the dynamics are regular, although the cold of winter also reduces attendance at meetings to a minimum number. It is an introspective period and daily rhythms are reduced, including mobility outside the usual circuit. Here too, the climatic rhythm can be visualised at the beat of the economic rhythm and the rhythms of communication, as in fact occurs with these meetings. Seen this way, the monthly group work meetings acquire the

Cultural Rhythmics

60

character of a ritual, they form a group rhythm that mobilises daily, communicative, economic, political rhythms and, of course, they are articulated in correlation to local climatic rhythms. In summary, the advisory work with these two associative groups has allowed me to have permanent and direct contact with the tourist practices that the members carry out, constituting seasonal rhythms of tourist management (some monthly, others seasonal, others annual). The processes of formation, strengthening and support of both groups demarcate specific ways of doing tourism and contributing to local development. The translation of management work into participant observation gave rise to the systematic recording of the set of salient representations and their potential utility as symbolic components. These have been the vectors for analysing the socio-territorial dynamics of rural tourism from the articulation between the imaginaries of the interlocutors and their tourist practices interpreted as cultural rhythms.

3.2.3 Rhythmics of Leisure Within a general framework on the role of leisure in global tourism, in rural tourism, leisure can be characterised based on tourists’ search for outdoor activities, in direct contact with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’. In particular, the will to experience and participate in productive activities stands out, whether in the production of raw materials, in the preparation of homemade foods or in the tasting of regional gastronomy, of approaching everything that is ‘handmade’, in addition to all recreational activities such as walks, visits and excursions. The search for and use of ‘free time’ is a pattern that demarcates the meaning of leisure, and it is precisely on this point that it is useful to apply the rhythmic methodology and its emphasis on alternating practices: free– occupied, leisure–work, expense–production, inaction–action and the like. As already explained in Chapter 1, it is not conducive to speak of free ‘time’, as the confusion between the phenomenon of becoming and its contextualised interpretation is reproduced. What is denoted by free time is the void of activity in a linear temporality, where the series of daily actions are imagined as a production line where freedom arises before the void at a given moment in the series. That line of production can well be considered as the whole year, the same calendar. The structure of calendars and almanacs tends to reproduce that serialised image of the happening of the days followed by vacation; the moments of ‘free time’ are highlighted in the calendars as inactive or moments for displacement. It is typical to find ‘holidays’, that is, leisure and

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

61

freedom from the oppression of routine work for the rest of the year, highlighted, circled and underlined in the calendars on kitchen walls, in offices, in paper or digital planners form. This sense entails the idea of ‘using time’, of spending it, of consuming it, of taking advantage of it, of making it yield, of getting the most out of it (of juice, of income, of life), as if it were an economic object, an object for use and consumption. ‘Consider that time is money […] consider that time is credit’ said Benjamin Franklin in his councils to a young merchant (Franklin, 1882, p. 1), a maxim that already sentenced the modus operandi of capitalism, or the spirit of capitalism, as Weber called it in his pioneering works of 1905 (Weber, 2003, p. 38). Llorenc Prats explained the emergence of this feedback process between leisure and consumption: with the development, in advanced capitalist societies, of the consumption of leisure and tourism (more time, space and money dedicated to these activities and, therefore, more companies and initiatives in this regard), heritage activations have acquired another dimension, they have entered the market openly and have come to be evaluated in terms of consumption (mainly visitors, but also merchandising and media advertising), with consumption acting as a measure of both political efficacy and contribution to the development or consolidation of the leisure market -tourist-cultural. (Prats, 2005, p. 22) Now, what is leisure? What is sought through its consumption? Leisure can be characterised through specific rhythms, since it combines the passivity of not-doing with the activity of doing-nothing, which is articulated with the opposite rhythm of daily work, where not-doing is seen as unproductive, and therefore any possibility of passivity is restricted; there is non-passivity and all-activity. In rural tourism, this diametrical opposition between the passive and the active becomes more flexible and relaxed and gives rise to other rhythms, which alternate the polarity of actions and experiences that the non-rural environment drags along. This is clearly expressed in the set of city road rhythms to which the urban tourist is usually indoctrinated: the stop–wait–go rhythm of the traffic light, the clutch–gear lever rhythm in cars, the brake–wait rhythm when yielding at the crosswalk, the rhythmic start of the engine-fasten the seatbelt-turn on the lights, among others. In rural areas, this relaxation of the active–passive means that leisure is impregnated with rhythmic nuances that can generate the necessary arrhythmia that changes the tourist’s rhythm. In this way, leisure in rural tourism, ruralised leisure, is configured by the natural and cultural

62

Cultural Rhythmics

rhythms that make ‘what is rural’, that is, that transform the physical environment into a rurally configured one: the celestial rhythms (natural light of the sun, moon phases); climatic rhythms (rain, wind, temperatures); animal rhythms (rooster crowing, bird singing, cow bleating, egg-laying of chickens); plant rhythms (cultivation processes and the garden, plant development); and the combination of all the rhythms throughout the year in the ritualised seasons (cutting, planting, harvesting, irrigation, drying, stripping, manufacturing moment), that is, the seasonal rhythmics. This specific coexistence of rhythms that characterises rural areas – polyrhythm according to Lefebvre –, which builds rurality, is clearly seen in the guided tour of a dairy and cheese factory offered by the Campo Udi establishment, near the town of Saldungaray. Being able to witness milking is conditioned by the rhythms of the animals and the extraction process (from the cows’ stride on the way to the dairy, by the moment the cows are fed and by the dairyman’s positioning of the teat cups, by the amount of milk extracted, by the exit stride towards the corral, among others). A whole sequence of correlative actions that set the milking process’ rhythm, which confront the tourist’s intentionality, who visits the dairy farm to ‘consume dairy leisure’, and usually generates arrhythmias for both the visitor and the host. In the context of a meeting of the INTA group, Fabian, the owner, recounted that in the guided tours of the dairy farm: ‘The tourist’s first preconcept is that milk is made only with water and grass; they don’t know that the cow has to be pregnant and have a calf to produce milk’. This ignorance of the basic process of how milk is produced means that the visitor does not know what dynamics they may encounter and explains the general ‘confusion’ that seizes them when faced with a rural environment and its rhythms. In addition, no matter how much trouble a tourist might generate or how hurried they might be to move on to the next activity, the rhythm of that scene is managed by the dairy farmer based on the animal and technical rhythms aforementioned. In this case, the planned leisure activity is inevitably nourished by the ‘passivity’ that these rhythms suppose, and mobilise the change of attitude in the tourist. If the visit continues later in the cheese manufacturing and sale sector, the host can already manage the tempo of the situation and speed up the exhibition of the process, if necessary, to lessen the tourist’s rush to buy the cheese and consummate-consume the tourist event. The hosts say that it is common for the tourist to ‘drop in at any time’, without considering the time of the siesta, lunch or dinner, – ‘they think that one is only here to serve them, but it is not like that here. Besides, you have to take care of the cows, feed them, milk them, make the cheese, take it to town,

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

63

take care of the children’. The same happens with the use of space, since a lack of location in the rural environment is manifested: ‘the lack of posters and walls disorients them; they leave the cars anywhere; they come into the kitchen to ask you a question; it’s like they don’t know how to handle themselves in large, open places, they’re used to living indoors, in offices’. This conversation referred me to Hall’s proxemic studies, regarding the ‘confusion’ of the use of space between different cultures. In this case the confusion occurs within the same culture, simplified into ‘Argentine culture’, which does not explain the range of behaviours that can be observed in a rural tourism venture. For this reason, I understand that it is more precise to identify the rhythms of culture in order to analyse the differences in how the territory is imagined and inhabited, instead of considering typified cultures, divided by nationalities or by places of origin that suppose naturalised attributes (the porteño lives in a constant state of hurry, the countryman is slow and technology baffles him). Fabian commented on other examples of this tourist ‘confusion’: – ‘they get out of the car and ask you – what is being done here? That is, they don’t even know where they are. And while you talk to them, they answer text messages, others wait in the car for you to come out, and if you don’t go looking for them quickly, they leave; others walk into the kitchen. Sometimes they get as far as the road and turn around’. Returning to the analysis, the tension that exists between rural rhythms and urban rhythms is clear, both for the tourist and for the rural host. And this confusion that manifests itself can be interpreted as a process of cultural arrhythmia, of imbalances between the rhythms of leisure and work, which in turn resonate in the imbalance of rhythms of life in proximity or distance to natural rhythms in relation to habitat. For this reason, I emphasise that the characterisation of the ‘field’, whether rural or urban or another, can be done based on its rhythms. Another clear example of arrhythmia occurs in the horseback riding venture that the Delgado family conducts in the Campo Equino establishment, in Villa Serrana La Gruta. Horacio, along with his brother Gerardo, has about 50 horses for guided tours of ‘the Shire’. He told me about his intuition: how, when a tourist comes in a hurry, he can tell if they might be dangerous for the rest of the group and for their own safety. Anticipating the situation, he chooses to give this person the calmest horse, which can withstand the tourist’s accelerated pace. He told me: ‘it is typical that they want to make the horse trot or mark the walking pace, when it is very important that they to follow the slow pace that we mark. More than once, they end up on the ground or against a fence, because the horse perceives that attitude and as soon as it can, it gets rid of them’. In this story, the symbiosis and the eurythmy (Lefebvre) that occurs between the human rhythm and the animal, in this case the equine

64

Cultural Rhythmics

rhythm, is remarkable. What does the horse ‘perceive’? How does the horse ‘know’ that his transient rider is forcing him at a rate that is not what his usual rider gives him? The walking rhythm that the tourists try to impose on the horse contradicts the rhythm that the lender offers through an animal rhythm, which, although it can be trained or led, is not infallible. Lefebvre takes precisely the example of horse taming to explain the articulation of rhythms that occurs in the processes of training and domestication, both in animals and in humans – he cites military training and high-performance sports as examples (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 40). Another specific quality of rural tourism is the displacement ‘into the interior’, travelling inside the pampa, hundreds of kilometres from the urban capitals, as if it were, at the same time, a trip to the past of the country, a trip to the origins of Argentine history. On several occasions, Santiago D´ıaz, owner of a Land Rover 4 3 4 excursion company, has told me about the metropolitan tourists’ surprise at the number of kilometres they have to travel to reach the mountains, and when they get into a vehicle equipped with multiple devices (GPS, VHF radio, winch) and find features of modernity coexisting with the indomitable nature that the service proposes they transit. The process of ‘travelling’ that tourism implies supposes a cultural rhythm as a set of rhythms present in the displacement and the distances between the origins–destinations that can be formulated in any tourist practice. John Urry defines the notion of ‘departure’ in a similar way: ‘a limited break with the established routines and practices of daily life’ (Urry, 2004, p. 2), a concept that can be understood as the beginning of the change of rhythm, as it is the end of the routine. Just as the place of residence marks the place of destination, the social function of the trip is given by the place of origin and the social position that this travel legitimises, updates or puts into discussion. Travelling to the periphery of urban centres means that, in addition to the ‘delayed’ technological change and the reduced civilisational imprint that is expected to be found, it is feasible to find ‘places of peace’, ‘corners of the world where one can rest’ and ‘refuges of the urban jungle’, that is, areas that allow changing the rhythm of life. It is also relevant to return here to the complementary relationship between natural and cultural rhythms. All social dynamics are sustained by natural rhythms that demarcate the moments of intervention of cultural, human rhythms. The light–dark rhythm is the most obvious framework; its influence on the circadian rhythm is widely known (Golombek & Rosenstein, 2010). Celestial rhythms predominate in different rural tourism activities, where they demarcate the beginnings and ends of guided walks, visits to productive processes, activities linked to lunar rhythms such as fishing and hunting, either

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

65

due to the tides or the nocturnal behaviour of certain animals. The setting of the sun on a guided walk, for example, is essential to give closure to it, not only because it is a direct sign of the absence of light to continue walking in an environment without artificial lights (street lighting), but also because of the ‘symbolic closure’ of the day, by the ‘death’ of the day at sunset, which will be reborn at dawn the next day. These ‘contents’, although they are not made explicit in the guide’s speech or in the visitor’s interpretation, operate in the experience of those who do not have the daily experience of sunset and do not directly and completely perceive the rhythm of the planetary rotation around the sun. In the guided walks that I have shared with guides and tourists, I found that it is not necessary to ask the tourist if they really felt the change in rhythm of light and non-light, or if they had the sensation of ‘the death of the day’ as a change intrinsic to nature; the tourist never hesitates to take a picture of the sun while it ‘hides’ or asks someone else to take a picture of him ‘next to the sun’, as if he were another visitor on the promenade, thereby approaching, making an intelligible sensation that does not need to be rationalised, and that is fully experienced. In these guided tours, it is typical to take a photo with the landscape in the background, merging subject and context in the snapshot. What is being portrayed in the capture of that ephemeral image that is always similar to what has already been seen but, at the same time, never identical? Are they taking a photo of the sun or are they trying to capture the connection that one has with that moment during sunset? The tour guide Gustavo Sandobal has told me that, unlike the outward journey during which everyone is talking, during the walks back, there are endless silences in the group, where a connection with the environment is manifested, where the group listens to the soundscape that surrounds them. And this need to connect with the environment is not reduced to vision, colours and shapes; it includes the sound and the silences that compose it. Santiago D´ıaz told me about his experience guiding a blind tourist on a 4 3 4 excursion, who could only recognise the landscape by touching it. He explained the environment to her while he made her touch the rocks, the grasslands, the plants, the water and in this way, he materially reconstructed the landscape that he habitually transmitted visually, indicating – ‘look there at the folds of the hill, see this buffalo here’. The materiality of this touristic experience was given by connecting with the textures of the environment and the feeling of imbalance that he perceived when making ascents and descents at steep angles. Thus, I reach another of the key cultural rhythms in tourism, in which rural tourism is no exception: the appropriation of the touristic moment, its record

Cultural Rhythmics

66

in personal and family files, and its memorisation. As mentioned, taking photos, filming, portraying a landscape, even touching and materialising implies multiple meanings of the act of capturing. As a temporality, that is, as a contextualised interpretation of becoming, the capturing of the touristic moment is the intention of retaining the presence of the past-been, of the past that vanishes and that is attempted to be presented by giving it an accessible material support: looking at photos, videos or portraits, feeling an object, smelling the aroma; actions tending to re-memorise, re-present, and as the word says, make the experience present again. The rhythms of leisure, in short, are configured from the combination of the imaginaries and practices of the ‘modern rhythm of life’ (getting educated, working, resting, retiring) which, in their simplest expression, manifest the intention of finding a change of rhythm that opposes and gives meaning to the daily life that sustains the rhythm of life mentioned.

3.3 AGRICULTURE As with the experience I had with other scientific or technical communities – biologists, archaeologists, palaeontologists, park rangers, tourism guides and technicians, museologists (Iparraguirre, 2017) – it was enriching to be able to listen to the voices of agronomists from participant observation and discuss, in their environment of action, how they move and why they move, learn the language, codes, gestures, the logic of construction of knowledge and agronomic doing. Agronomists are moved by an interest in making the land produce food. They are moved by the fact that the combination of seeds, water, light and land allows crops to be grown and therefore sustain human life, just one of many forms of nature which surround them: pastures, cereals, cows, sheep, pigs, bees, insects, parasites, bacteria, viruses and fungi. The natural is an everyday concept, which extends and spreads between human, cultural, social, artificial and chemical interventions. It also motivates agronomists to know that moving to the fields is synonymous with working, with a productive activity that sustains individuals, families and entire regions. Its unit of meaning is ‘the countryside’, an entity that encompasses all of the above and that they also consider the central element of the ‘economic development of the country’, a country that is decidedly agricultural. Plants and animals, seeds and wombs, grass and livestock, and cereals and meat are the main binomials of this constellation of imaginaries and practices that in general are not even named, because they are given as genetic assumptions of any discussion that refers to agriculture, livestock or any agricultural activity.

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

67

The specific objectives of this case arose from the dialogue with the agronomists, from my daily work at the INTA agency since 2011, by having permanent contact with the communication and translations problems between the producers and the community. Being in permanent dialogue with the agronomists, I began to realise the relevance that a social study would have on the interstices in the communication between technicians and producers, between technicians and officials, and between the latter and the producers. In different situations between these actors, I visualised a dynamic of communication that crystallised in a dialectic between three watertight positions and three sets of people-ideas-actions that required to be characterised under another logic, in order to be denaturalised and re-interpreted. The general objective that I set for myself when facing this case was to contribute to the anthropological study of the imaginary about the territory–production–sustainability relationship in the southwest of Buenos Aires Province, and in particular in the Tornquist District. Within this framework, I defined specific objectives that would allow me to get closer to the centre of the problem. In the first place, I set out to observe and analyse, based on anthropological fieldwork, what were the imaginaries about territorial development and sustainability, focussing on the three groups mentioned in interaction with the Agency INTA Tornquist. This entailed identifying the historical development of the symbolic components of these imaginaries – such as nature, the soil, the landscape and its productive use – in each of these groups. Subsequently, the components were subsequently reordered based on three constellations of representations. A third objective was to survey and analyse the discourses that legitimise the respective common-sense imaginaries about ‘the natural and the cultural in rural life’, ‘the exotic and the native’, ‘the conservation and exploitation of biodiversity’, ‘productivism and sustainability’, ‘family and industrial agriculture’, ‘urban and rural’, and ‘economic growth and social welfare’. This was linked to identifying the imaginaries about intensive and family agriculture among rural producers in the two representative regions of the area of influence of the Experimental Agronomic Station (EEA) Bordenave of INTA: the semi-arid region and the sub-humid region. In a complementary way, within the dynamics of the agency and the experimental station, it was specified as relevant to survey and analyse the discourses and strategies used by the different technical actors when transferring research and extension activities to different groups of rural producers in the region. As a last objective, we have been analysing the conflicts of interests and the institutional discussions that occur in the exercise of political decision-making focused on local–global practices such as: the rise of intensive agriculture, the deterritorialisation of

68

Cultural Rhythmics

local producers, the global ecological crisis and the ‘sustainability’ of production processes, among others. Likewise, looking inside INTA, it was proposed to survey and analyse the discourses and strategies used by the different technical actors when transferring research and extension activities to different groups of rural producers in the district. This objective also emerged in dialogue with the technical actors, when evaluating the confrontational discourses between researchers and extension workers, as if they were two diametrically opposed ways of practising agronomy, or at least of carrying out work at INTA.

3.3.1 Imaginaries of Agricultural Production The entire interaction process with the interlocutors was organised in three phases. In the first phase, and based on the imaginary matrix of constellations, components and categories of the case, I designed an interview sheet that I used as a guide for questions on field trips. According to the definitions presented in Chapter 2, it is possible to interpret the network of meanings of the imaginaries if their minimum elements (categories), their groupings into components, and the maximum set systematised as constellations are inclusively explored. This spreadsheet varied depending on the results obtained during the conversations and when verifying whether or not they were useful to analyse the data, until it took the final form shown in Scheme 9. This spreadsheet model was used to interview both the farmers, technicians and officials, varying the meaning of the questions for each of the groups. The guided interviews were recorded with the recording of the audios on the cell phone, the writing of punctual phrases of the answers was recorded in my notes folder and, in some cases, photographs of the scene were taken. The matrix of social imaginaries for this case was finally configured in three constellations: territory, family and industrial agriculture; and sustainability (Fig. 6). The territory constellation emerged as the first set of representations to account for ‘where’ ‘territorial development’ is produced, lived and generated. This groups five components: identity, production, field, technology and land. The first component is identity, which includes the categories of: family history, migrations and genealogy. Production includes the categories of: way of working, productive sense and productive relationship with the land; traditions and legends; and work philosophy, rhythms of work and life. Productive yields (kg/has, amount of farm, among others). The field component groups: affective relationship with the land and historical and family relationship.

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

69

Social Imaginaries Constellations

Components Identity

Production

Territory

Countryside

Technology

Land Agricultural production

Family

Industry Family and industrial agricultural Rural-urban

Patrimony

Welfare Progress Ecology Sustainability Education

Development

Categories Family history, migrations, genealogy. Work philosophy. Life rhythms. Form of work, productive sense, productive relationship with the land. Traditions, lore. Work rhythms. Agriculture, livestock. Performance. Emotional relationship with the land, historical and familiar relationship Stance regarding technology: innovative, traditionalist. Monoculture, natural pastures, direct sowing or conventional sowing. Idea of the concept of territory. Relationship with the land. Nature and culture. Idea of a group, image of kinship, continuity between generations. Capitalism, modernization, companies, multinationals, sowing pools. Rurality, local and foreign, traditionalisms and globalization. Ownership of the land, belonging, heirs, patrimony, Transmission of knowledge and assets. Quality of life, ways of life, health. Idea of progress. Evolution, change, globalization. Agroecology, environment, nature. Knowledge, wisdoms, professional training. Science, technology. Extension, research. Notion of development and change, paradigm and world view.

Fig. 6. Analysis Matrix of Social Imaginaries About Agriculture.

Technology includes: attitude towards the technical (innovative or traditionalist); and monocultures, natural pastures, and direct or conventional sowing. Finally, the land component points out the categories related to the territory from a physical and productive perspective: territory concept, productive relationship, soil, nature and culture. The family and industrial agriculture constellation resulted from the need to explore the tensions and setbacks that I explained at the beginning of the

70

Cultural Rhythmics

chapter, given the observation of Hugo Kruger as a central problem within INTA. When exploring its components, testing how they turned out in the interviews and what analytical utility could be obtained, these were divided into four: family,iIndustry, rural–urban and heritage. The family component integrates: group idea, kinship image and continuity between generations. Integrated industry groups: capitalism, modernisation, companies, multinationals and planting pools. Rural–urban groups categories related to the rural, the urban and the intermediate: rurality, the local and the foreign, traditionalisms and globalisation. As patrimony, it refers to its legal meaning: land tenure, belonging, heirs and patrimony; private property; and transmission of knowledge and goods. The third constellation, sustainability, necessarily had to combine the productive and economic components already explored in the two previous constellations, with the ‘symbolic variables’ absent in the background consulted on this concept that cuts across all agronomic practices. In this way, I formulated five components that allow accounting for its multi-focality: well-being, progress, ecology, education and development. The well-being component groups are: quality of life, ways of life, and health. Progress groups are idea of progress, evolution, change and globalisation. Ecology summarises the categories of agro-ecology, environment and nature. Integrated education includes knowledge, wisdom and training; science and technology; and extension and research. Development was limited to the notion of development and change, paradigm, and world view. This last component gradually changed its position in the symbolic field since it could be located directly as a constellation, next to territory. Finally, I preferred to leave it at the same level of analysis as ‘progress’, since when asking about progress, development was always brought up, and vice versa. A conundrum that began to be revealed in the coming and going of this algebraic game of categories and symbols, was that the root imaginary, territorial development, was made up of two constellations (development and territory) that, being highly loaded with representations, complicated their approach and the recurring confusion of meanings and interpretations. As will be seen in depth in the conclusions, this hyper-semantisation of ‘territorial development’ is one of the keys to addressing its translation between groups with different imaginaries, and it is one of the methodological keys of how to intervene in the design of dissemination, extension and technological adoption strategies. In a second phase, I put together another spreadsheet that brought together the literal transcription of the answers of the interviewees, according to the double criteria of contents related to temporality (processes in the future) or spatiality (uses of space), ordered, according to their time, in the three sets of

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

71

social dynamics. Although during the interviews I worked with these three groups of interlocutors separately, at the time of writing this chapter, the conclusions arising from the comparison between them were combined, in order to agree on a more dynamic and articulated narrative with the theoretical framework. Finally, when writing the analysis of all the material, the content of all the transcripts and their interpretations were correlated according to the set of imaginaries described and their correlation in the factual plane, through the rhythms that unfold in the following sections. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, it is feasible to group cultural rhythms into three operative categorisations: rhythms of social organisation, rhythms of sustenance, rhythms of world view (Fig. 2), without all of them necessarily being present in the ethnographic material. In this case, specific rhythms were identified for each of the three constellations, and shared rhythms were identified at the component level. In the analysis of the constellation ‘territory’, the productive rhythms, the calendrical ones, the seasonal ones and their connection with the technological representations were detected. These were built from the analysis of the temporality and spatiality of the daily, seasonal and communicative rhythms of life at the social organisation level, as well as economic and political rhythms, at the livelihood level. In turn, in the synchronous analysis of constellations/ components/categories, they combine the categories of the components of the ‘territory’ constellation (family history, migrations, genealogy, way of working, affective and productive relationship with the land, traditions, legends, work philosophy, attitude towards the technical, monocultures, natural pastures, direct sowing, conventional sowing, concept of territory, notion of soil, notion of nature and culture). For the constellation ‘family and industrial agriculture’, the agro-family, agro-industrial, urban and rural rhythms were identified, all of these condensed into the rhythms of rurality. Here, the characteristic rhythms of social organisation and sustenance were also analysed, but combined with the categories defined for the components of this constellation (kinship, capitalism, technification, companies, industrialisation, rurality, the local and the foreign, traditionalism, globalisation, land tenure, belonging, heirs, heritage, private property, transmission of knowledge and assets). For the ‘sustainability’ constellation, the rhythms of work, well-being and progress were identified. The rhythms that constitute them were combined with the identified categories (quality of life, ways of life, health, idea of progress, evolution, change, globalisation, agro-ecology, environment, nature, knowledge, wisdom, training, notion of development and change, paradigm, world view). Particularly in this last constellation, rhythms corresponding to

72

Cultural Rhythmics

the third level of systematisation were also detected, which are the rhythms of the world view, since they explore categories related to the ideologies and utopias of the environment and quality of life.

3.3.2 Rhythmics of Rurality and Industrialisation In the agronomic cosmos, there is a triple relationship between what farmers’ representations are of themselves, what they use and what they access. Understanding the socio-productive dynamics of the territory requires knowing these three values, and interpreting how it influences decision-making. When conducting ethnography, I decided against polarising categories to not run into the dilemma of being or not being industrial. On this dilemma, other dichotomies are performed that, when provoked from the questions, I began to realise that they operated in relation to that scale that family capital and industrial capital suppose. The rural and the urban, the countryside and civilisation, inherit that ambiguous separation of ‘stages’ that carry evolutionary prejudices of Victorian progressivism. Family and industry are the new avatars of this forced setback that must be able to order the world in two opposite ways. We have families, and we have industries; that is clear. However, extrapolating that we have purely family or purely industrial agriculture, with the categories of ‘family’ or ‘industry’ very loaded with prejudice and imaginaries, entails epistemological problems that translate into operational dilemmas, in how we should approach such ‘forms of agriculture’ that we already assume are circumscribed to those formats. Agro-industry, for example, is not reduced to the set of industrial practices but is in turn the set of industrial imaginaries dynamised in industrial rhythms, which respond to other rhythms that define them in their organisation, livelihood, or world view. I found familiar rhythms that exist in the field, the agro-familiar ones, as well as industrial rhythms, the agro-industrial ones that also occur in the field. But this cannot lead me to say that there is a typology of agro-family that responds to certain types of rhythms, because it would be forcing the concept to tell me what rhythms I should find. When a family of farmer tells me, as occurred in three of the interviews, – ‘this is a family business’ –, the partition is no longer viable to continue to be used; the possibility of looking for ‘family rhythms’ on the one hand and ‘industrial rhythms’ on the other is broken. In fact, every industry has its foundational roots in a minimal community made up of one or more families, and no industry can sustain itself if the families

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

73

who founded it, and those who support it, cease to legitimise their social capital around it. As Latour explains well, a central problem of universalisation invented by modern thought is having erased the intermediary objects of the extremes, which once isolated, no longer say anything: Without the innumerable objects that guarantee both their duration and their hardness, the traditional objects of social theory - empire, classes, professions, organizations, States - become so many mysteries […] For example, what is the size of IBM, or the Red Army, or the Ministry of National Education, or the world market? By the way, these are large players because they mobilize hundreds of thousands or millions of agents… however… we never leave the local. We are always in interaction with four or five people. (Latour, 2007, p. 175) It occurs with these objects of sociological and economic theory, ‘family’ and ‘industry’, which Latour remarks as the problem of connecting the local and the global from their extremes. It is the problem of remaining in the micro and in interpersonal contexts, to abruptly move to the macro, with decontextualised and depersonalised rationalities: ‘networks are the intermediary dispositions that allow going from the local to the global’ (Latour, 2007, pp. 176–177). I understand that the rhythms of rurality, in the transition from the rural to the urban, from the micro to the macro, make it possible to visualise these networks of rhythms – or polyrhythms in Lefebvre’s language – that connect families with markets, companies with social actors, and organic crops from small gardens with boats full of fertilisers. The rhythms of rurality are manifested ‘on horseback’, between the countryside and the city. On horseback is an idiom used to connote a relationship mediated by two elements. This was literally the case when the only means of transportation to get from the countryside to the town was the horse, prior to the rise of the automobile in the 1950s. The polarity between the city and the countryside is characterised by various concepts to refer to a dilemma that is neither fixed nor permanent, which is a border and a regionalisation at the same time (Benedetti, 2009), and which is found in many cases as an unquestionable doxa from other classifications and everyday assertions. City–country, urban–rural and urbanisation–interior are the most common. New concepts today try to make sense of this polarity by joining the terms, such as ‘rur-urban’ and ‘neo-rural’. Although their efforts contribute to the general discussion, I understand that

74

Cultural Rhythmics

they do not allow us to solve the dilemma of how to make concrete decisions in the face of ‘contradictions’, ‘conflicts’ or ‘hybrid objects’ that escape the nomenclatures, and that its conceptual inconsistency slips through the fingers of analysis. My proposal, then, is that the rhythms of rurality are nourished by agro-family rhythms and agro-industrial rhythms, at the same time. As already discussed in Chapter 3, this does not imply that there are rural rhythms per se, which would mean that one notion of ‘what is rural’ can explain or represent all of them. Rurality, as a rhythmic, supposes a contextualised interpretation, that is, a temporality and a spatiality, which of course depend on the social group and the territorial context. If we take the voice of the farmers and their practices, we find that the rhythm of rural activity is marked by urban rhythms (going shopping, going to the accountant, to the municipality, to pay taxes, to the bank) and that in turn are represented with the character of rural rhythms: ‘Tornquist is an agricultural town’ – say the native inhabitants, – ‘it is not touristy like Sierra de la Ventana or Villa Ventana’. The latter are ‘touristic’ and not agricultural, because urban rhythms are defined by the dynamics of entry and exit of tourists, whether they come from rural or urban areas; it is indifferent to the purposes of how the rhythm of urban life is marked for its permanent inhabitants. As already analysed when considering the rhythms of tourism management, in the annual tourist cycle of this region, there are two commercial rhythms that alternate, the high and low season. The high season is summer vacation, Easter, winter vacation, spring and some ‘long’ holidays, but not all. Low season is everything that lies between the milestones mentioned, especially the period from March to August. In agriculture, the correlation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is associated with moments of work intensity: harvesting and sowing in agriculture; service moments, weaning, vaccination, calving and stocking of the hacienda with livestock; hive preparation, bee feeding and honey collection in beekeeping, among other activities. So, although the differentiation between rural and urban is manifested in discourses, it is possible to find the combination of rhythms that melt the limits between both territorialisations: there are agro-family-rural rhythms (getting on the tractor to plough, moving the hacienda, milking the cows) and agro-family-urban rhythms (going to the counter, buying supplies, getting guides at SENASA, taking the children to kindergarten or school), as well as agro-industrial-rural rhythms (spraying a crop with pesticide from a small plane, harvesting 50 hectares per day with the latest harvester on the market, making a silo-bag with the harvest), and agro-industrial-urban (transporting the harvest to a collector, taking the farm to an auction or refrigerator, manage

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

75

credits at the bank). With these materials in hand, how can I tell if it is a rural or urban development, or if it is family or industrial venture? What is the operational meaning of this distinction? Can’t the same family that milk their cows hire an agro-service that sprays the field industrially? Do a family that live in the countryside and send their children to school in the town or city contribute to rural or urban development? The same topology ‘in the countryside’ presupposes characteristics that are not fixed and that vanish in the so-called ‘peri-urban’ or ‘semi-rural’ zones, notions that force the geographical and regionalist notions that are also socio-cultural. Although the current paradigm of ‘territorial development’ promoted by state agencies such as INTA postulates an integrating approach, the diagnosis carried out shows that, on the ground, the imaginaries of farmers, technicians and officials continue to be polarised by traditional objects such as ‘family’, ‘industry’, ‘rural’ or ‘urban’. Exploring the rhythms of rurality in tension with those of urbanity led me to a contradiction: the countryside is no longer alone in the countryside; the city is no longer limited to the urban structure; the field no longer ends at the wires of the last square that lead to the neighbour’s lot, the local road, or the highway. In fact, the fields of intensive agriculture without livestock no longer even have wires, because they hinder the work dynamics of the seeders and harvesters. It is a continuum of land and seeds, and no longer plots with different functionalities. So, familiar entails segmentation and industrial entails homogeneity? I understand that the proposal must go towards these delimitations and not force them to imprison the territories in outdated categories for the current situation. If the focus is to achieve rural development, and the rural is no longer as you imagined, what am I developing? If, in addition to not knowing what it means to develop something, whatever it is, I simplify the problem of misrepresenting what I have under my feet, giving it a name that it no longer has, what am I doing? What defines an environment as ‘rural’, as ‘ruralised’ or ‘non-rural’, ‘urban’ or city? What makes a space that continues to be a rurality, rural? Thus, I come to the conclusion that rurality can be understood as the spatiality of life in the countryside, the apprehension of the country space in its multiple configurations (landscape, productive, territorial, among others). When exploring the rhythms of ‘rural life’, the answer that can be given is that its characterisation responds to the temporality and spatiality of social groups and not to the rural environment per se. I have discovered rural tourism, rural heritage and rural production because I am constantly apprehending notions of time and space that, when practised, reveal the intrinsic articulation they have with the natural rhythms of the environment where they take place. It is a matter of interpreting rural rhythms as a set of rhythms that make up rurality,

Cultural Rhythmics

76

and not as a set of rural rhythms that assume that ‘what is rural’ configures rurality, in the way of linking with the environment. The rural rhythm is built by grouping organisational and productive practices in relation to the natural rhythms (of the climate, of the animals, of the fertility cycles, of the vital cycles, of the ‘weeds’) and not based on rural rhythms per se. I know. This combination turns the actions carried out in the field into rural ones. The urban rhythm, in contrast, is built by grouping productive practices in relation to rhythms which are alien to natural, intrinsically cultural processes (architecture, artificial materials, virtual rhythms, the Internet, domestication, refrigerators, electric light, in short, everything that departs from the natural rhythm). Then, it is not conducive to describe urban rhythms ad hoc either, considering urban rhythms instead, or urbanity, which both combine cultural and natural rhythms in another way, more distant than when referring to the rural. This leads me to a maxim that, due to its generality, is completed in the conclusions: all rhythm is constructed as a combination of natural and cultural rhythms.

3.3.3 The Imagined Technology Modernity (also found as post- or over-modernity) was the cultural horizon of all the technological change that accompanied the intensification of agriculture globally. Its presence in Argentina, as in most of Latin America, is manifested in production dynamics aimed at the intensification of processes and the over-exploitation of resources. For instance, interviews with farmers of different generations made clear that in the life rhythm previous to the global boom of transportation and mass media, farmers did not experience a discrepancy between their daily rhythms of work and those of rest and leisure as there is today. From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, the rhythm of life incorporated overlapping activities that polarised the ways of living during and off work, confronting them in the end. The dichotomy between leisure and work, rest and sustenance, and working to live and living to work became more radical. Simultaneously, the influence of global economic rhythms on local territories (intensification, fertilisation, acceleration of processes, and industrialisation in general) altered the own rhythms of resources and local climate variables. In a European context, and focused in rural villages in France, Zonabend (1984) and Hodges (2010) remarked the same process of rupture in the marking of eras or epochs given in the 1950s: ‘Monadi`eres was shaken during the 1950s by the mechanization of agriculture, just as Minot was, and other

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

77

important changes in customary life occurred during the same decade’ (Hodges, 2010, p. 123). Zonabend even observes a change of rhythm for this transition in the representation of the era or ‘epoch’: ‘Around the 1950s the rhythm of change sped up. So, the gradual adjustments and long movements of adaptation broke up, and a new era really began’ (Zonabend, 1984, p. 195). Modernisation – approaching the most recent modernity –, today entails being ‘up-to-date’ by getting the latest model available of anything (being it a combined harvester, tractor, pickup, seeds, vaccines, fertiliser, pesticide or a smartphone). In the rhythmic record, to have access and getting ‘the latest’ of something is to approach the immediacy of becoming that assimilates a status of the real closest, legitimated in its economic correlate, its exchange value and its socio-cultural capital. Before and now, far and close, old and new; images reflecting the linear and mechanistic temporality that conceives production and social processes over a straight line of natural numbers, or on a mass production conveyor belt, or on the rails of a train track, or on the furrows made on the ground by agricultural machinery. The ‘modern’ modes of imagining technology are symbolic and technical expressions of how the notion of development is a precise temporality that sets an inexorable life rhythm to the beat of a socially shared urgency. During this journey of technological imaginations associated to agriculture, I found two conceptualisations mentioned by the interviewee as a basic classification for implementing agricultural practices or policies: technology of processes and technology of inputs. The former refers to the management of production resources, such as modes of tillage, crop rotations, cattle handling; that is, those practices which mainly respond to human intervention, to decisions made by the farmer on his own resources. The latter connects the use of products and machinery, such as fertilisation, use of agrochemicals, or use of a particular combine harvester or seed drill. Tension prompted by this double view on technology swings, in its turn, between two ideologies that coexist daily, and are both simplified as productivist and agro-ecological. The former is associated to the industrialisation of the countryside, intensive land and use of resources, the acceleration of processes through inputs (pesticides and fertilisers) or mechanisation, labour redundancy, and expectations of urgent results to comply with economic commitments and remain within the same dynamics. The latter, even though using inputs and mainly the same tools, adds the concept of sustainability, pays attention to soil and water conservation and does not respond to the same criterion of urgency set by the globalised rhythms of production. In one of the interviews with a researcher specialised in plant diseases, he stated, regarding management processes: ‘It is not only curing, materials are

Cultural Rhythmics

78

released so as not to apply fungicides, it is management. The producer looks for recipes and that implies inputs’. He also highlighted a trend in those who lease the fields, neglect management and force monoculture, resulting in ‘chacreados’ (mistreated) fields. This is aggravated when management is rushed and not everything within the farmer’s reach is applied, or when there is a resistance to change based on traditional practices, which configures a third ideology in tension with the two mentioned (productivism and agro-ecology): traditionalism. Haste, speed, speed urgency; it seems incongruous that these qualities describe the rhythm of life and production in the countryside, where the natural context of soil, pastures, cows, and sun (natural rhythms), seems to be coerced to such an extent by the productive rhythms. However, it happens, and as I confirmed in conversations with several producers, this contradiction in the rhythms of life and production is the ‘gear’ of the resistance to change that technicians interpret as ‘resistance to technological adoption’. Traditionalism and productivism end up ‘making sparks’ because they work without the mediation of any lubricant or intermediate piece that resolves the scale discrepancy that exists between a way of life and a way of producing. The technology of productive intensification and the overlapping of states of life has completely split the relationship between non-productive rhythms of life and production rhythms. The traditional farming practices that technicians compare to today’s technology did not imply, in their initial context, a disjunction with the farmer’s daily rhythm, since the productive rhythms did not reach the limits of some natural rhythms: when there was no artificial light, work ended at dusk and started at dawn; ploughing with horses required that they rest and feed to continue working; the overlapping of extra-productive activities had its limitations due to distances and the mobility of blood traction, an 80-year-old producer recounted that he went to town once a month or less. It is precisely an extreme alteration of the natural rhythms of the field that is proposed by a hyper-productivist technology that does not contemplate human biorhythms in its procedure, the balance that the producer must exercise when mediating between natural resources and their farming practices, management and technological intervention. As will be seen in the next section, the imaginary ‘sustainability’, under the paradigm of agro-ecology, currently operates as a socio-technical factor of balance between productivism and traditionalism. 3.3.4 Rhythmics of Sustainability I considered sustainability as one of the three constellations of the territorial development imaginary since the consulted precedents showed me that it was a

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

79

key factor, transversal to all areas of agricultural production in the region (Scheme 8). When designing the questionnaire guide to address this constellation, I broke down what the main categories around the ‘sustainability’ problem were, and how they could be grouped at the component level. After several desktop versions, and testing them with the first interviews, the components and their respective categories were specified as follows. The imaginary of well-being groups the categories: quality of life, ways of life and health; the imaginary of progress groups: ideas about progress, evolution, change and globalisation; the ecological imaginary groups: agro-ecology, environment and nature; the education imaginary groups: knowledge, wisdom, training, science and technology, and research and extension; and the development imaginary – which is a central component of sustainability – articulates the ideas of development and change, that of paradigm and vision of the world. As summarised in a technical bulletin carried out by various INTA researchers, the discussion about sustainability arose in the 1970s, in response to questions about agriculture called ‘industrialized’, also known as ‘conventional’, ‘modern’ and ‘capitalist’ (Kruger, ¨ 2013, p. 8). This agricultural model is characterised by aspects such as: Rapid application of technological innovations; considerable capital investment; large-scale exploitation; use of monoculture, generally based on high-yielding hybrids; extensive use of pesticides, fertilizers, and other external energy inputs; high efficiency in the use of resources, including labour and, frequently, integration with other links in the production and/or marketing chain in the form of ‘agribusiness’. ¨ (Kruger, 2013, p. 8) The study highlights that this technified conception of agriculture produced a highly productive impact on a global scale, with the aim of supplying food to the entire world population, even when the possibility of maintaining the necessary production rate was questioned. This has given rise to new questions about the scope of this model, highlighting the balance between increased production and energy efficiency, pressure on natural resources and the environment, progress on marginal environments that produce degradation and loss of biodiversity, and threats to human health (Kruger, ¨ 2013, pp. 8–9). Gustavo and Aida, farmers, told me: ‘the people you get to come during the day, expect you to pick them up at the house and in the evening, they sit you down in the truck so you can take them back to town, there’s no way they’d even consider staying the night. They also ask you that we have cell phone

80

Cultural Rhythmics

signal, internet, television, they want everything from the town, otherwise they won’t come’ – why do you think this happens? I asked, – ‘Because people are already used to all those comforts and they don’t value the silence and tranquillity of the countryside like we do, we who grew up here all our lives’. This response was not isolated; it was repeated in several interviews and was always linked to the difficulty of obtaining available and competent labour. In personal conversations with Hugo, an INTA agronomist, he told me that – ‘in the workshops it was discussed that the advance of agriculture over livestock causes the disappearance of a whole series of knowledge and trades such as field managers, wire fencers and millers’. Now, does the shortage of labour result in the comfort of urban life? Does that comfort imply only a flow of accesses to forms of communication, entertainment, distractions, immediate social and family life? Or rather, does it respond to the existential emptiness generated by facing the vastness of the countryside and the plain in the face of the overload of information that floods perceptions and does not allow subjects to find themselves, listen to themselves and perhaps ask themselves why they are there? Then I remembered the liquid life proposed by Bauman (2011) as a characteristic of postmodern and hyper-computerised societies, which have gone from a ‘solid’ life (stable, repetitive, predictable) to a liquid one (flexible, fickle, uncertain). Here, we have a guideline to address the problem from the symbolic approach: people who reject agricultural work imagine the countryside as too ‘solid’ for the ‘liquid’ life they lead in the town or city. Likewise, on a practical level, the rhythm of work in the field does not present moments or liquid elements; everything is solid and concrete, of a rather rough and heavy materiality, whether it is machinery, pastures or animals. In this sense, the shortage of labour does not only respond to the factual lack of personnel, since in the town there are many unemployed people, or who live on ‘changas’ (temporary jobs). The point is that these people choose not to work in the fields continuously, and if they go, they do so during the day and return at night, generating higher travel expenses. The field ceases to be a favourable option also, because it is not easily exchangeable for another job or ‘changa’. It implies a bond that, if it is going to be sustained, must be constant, at least for a season, and this is no longer a stable option given the acceleration of the technological rhythms of production, and the volatility of the bonds and commitments that have also mutated communication rhythms. Prior to the rise of direct seeding and fast harvesters, it was considered a ‘full season’ of work to ‘make the harvest’, between December and February, by taking charge of one of the machines required to carry out the complete cycle of the harvest, whether it be driving the harvester,

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

81

the tractor or the truck. As a result of this concern, I asked a producer how long the harvest ‘season’ lasts today and he told me: ‘four days, or less, you don’t even realize it, before you even realize it’s harvest time the trucks already took everything from the field’. In the problem identified as ‘agriculturisation’, understood as the growing and continuous use of land for agricultural crops instead of livestock or mixed ¨ uses (Kruger, 2013, p. 19), one of the effects highlighted is the ‘loss of social and cultural capital’. As Bourdieu (2014) has already explained, cultural capital is not only made up of materials, but mainly of access to training, education and the way of reproducing them. The ‘alteration of the social base of production’, as well as the ‘changes in land tenure’ that are mentioned in the same problem tree, are crossed by the localised intervention of the new global rhythms of intensified production, which it has visualised and manifested in the new faces, in the new ‘neighbours’ that no one knows anymore, who enter and leave the field without going to visit the others, who can no longer even be considered neighbours. When we discussed this issue with producers, the issue of regional depopulation arose, like Gustavo, for example, who told me pointing out the window: ‘the field that you see on that mountain was bought by a businessman from Buenos Aires who came once, left an employee there and was never seen again’. He explained about the new owners of his neighbourhood: – ‘they are professionals or politicians who made money with other jobs and buy fields as an investment, they don’t care if it’s land, a house or a factory, it’s a real estate investment, and if it produces something, better yet; they do everything at a minimum so as not to lose money, they still waste it’. When investigating the rural–urban component of the ‘family and industrial agriculture’ constellation, it was clear that the tension between what should be rural according to a geographical criterion and what is considered rural by the interlocutors was permanent. The movement between the countryside and the city responds to multiple logics, and these define multi-territorialities that are manifested in the variants of how families move in their territories, alternating positions that do not necessarily imply settling down or changing residence. ‘Migration’ is no longer just a change of address or location, as residence is divided into various levels of meaning: where they live, where they work, where they communicate, where relatives live and where they spend their vacations. Likewise, the factors cease to be external or internal as the limit of the centre and its periphery, or of the locality and its externality, become blurred. In other words, crystallised and indisputable spatial categories for a way of regionalising, which had clear geographical limits, have become plastic and relative in a context of multiple levels of

82

Cultural Rhythmics

meaning that are loaded on the territories, and this gives rise to review what spatialities build these new social dynamics. Among the conclusions of the study, Kruger states that agriculture under the industrialised model constitutes a problem of sustainability, and that although proper management practices stop soil degradation and increase yields, ‘possibly the greatest negative impact of this model in the region is ¨ associated with the social aspect’ (Kruger, 2013, p. 28). In this sense, the implementation of this anthropological approach focused on the symbolic material of the problems seeks to explain that the ‘social aspect’ is involved in all production processes and in all incidence on the territory, whether sustainable or not, precisely by putting various logics and agriculture management practices in dialogue. Likewise, I believe that paying attention to the rhythms of life allows us to understand that this approach to sustainability needs to know the daily dynamics of producers, without assuming generic processes that simplify the complexity of each situation. When ‘sustainable practices’ are mentioned in technical manuals, articles or economic reports (INTA, 2008; Loewy, 2008), they do not include the symbolic level, even when they propose to consider the capacities and connections of the different actors (INTA, 2007, p. 15) and contemplate the ‘symbolic appropriation’ in the definition of rurality (INTA, 2007, p. 12). In general, it is dissociated that ‘practical’ (doing) responds or articulates with ‘symbolic’ (deciding), and ‘social’ does not reach the level of subjectivity, since simplifying diversity based on the typification of groups, classes or sectors does not allow to interpret the cultural link between ‘subject’ and ‘group’. This last dilemma is one of the reasons why in anthropology it is preferred to speak of ‘social actors’ and not of ‘subjects’, ‘persons’ or ‘individuals’, since these categories do not signify that the actor is necessarily conceived as an intrinsic part of a social group. When it is stated that ‘the implementation of the concept of sustainability has to do with achieving a balance between its different axes: productive, environmental, economic and ¨ social’ (Kruger, 2013, p. 28), although it is clear that it is sought to consolidate a holistic and integrating approach: what is the social supposed to include? Is the symbolic level included? The analysis applied here proposes a complementary classification, which allows articulating the distinction between the symbolic and the material in its daily dynamics. As Kruger states, it is important to begin with the application of the concept to formalise real interdisciplinary work, which puts both agronomists and social scientists in multi-vocal dialogue, to which I propose to add farmers and officials. If these latter groups are integrated into work dynamics similar to those that technicians usually have, the results will be more socially

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

83

representative and their applications more precise. When comparing Diagram 8, which summarises the diversity of imaginaries diagnosed in a simplified way, and the problem trees of the cited study, there are components manifested by the interlocutors of my interviews that are completely absent in the tree that the technicians made, why is this? Why, in the technicians’ gaze is there a marked tendency to focus diagnoses on practices, on the empirical plane? And why the symbolic plane that this work emphasises is definitely lacking? I mean representations, symbols, ideologies, utopias, dreams, life plans, native categorisations, life philosophies and ways of working; in short, what is sought here to be integrated into a single concept: social imaginaries. In the same way, practices are conceived as ‘actions’ or ‘behaviours’ that respond to personal criteria, and therefore it is not considered that, as social facts, practices are group constructions, intrinsically linked to symbolic representations. Said in a single sentence: cultural rhythmics unify practices and imaginaries.

3.4 POLITICS The last case focuses on politicians in Argentina, as a group of decision-makers, comprising municipal, provincial and national officials working in the province of Buenos Aires. Since 2016 I’ve been working as the secretary of development at Tornquist municipality, Argentina, whose main activities are planning and coordination of government areas (such us social development, infrastructure, health, education, communication) and the design of ‘Agenda Tornquist 2030’, within the framework of the 2030 UN Goals. During the last six years, I’ve been in charge of coordinating more than 80 employees, 7 officials and 2 consultants that belong to the secretary of development. This area is composed by the agency of development; the office of employment; the subsecretary of social development with the office of disability, the direction of youth, gender and sexual diversity; and three more directions: culture, communication and sports. The double experience of being a civil servant as well as a researcher allowed me to carry out a constant ethnography of labour praxis, as well as understanding the practicality of exercising an anthropology of intervention, an anthropology applied to management. To address the relationship between political decisions, designs of the future and governance, the framework of analysis of the imaginaries of the future and

Cultural Rhythmics

84

the rhythms of anticipation is first presented, which will then be applied to the design of development agendas in the fourth chapter.2

3.4.1 Imaginaries of Future The importance in social sciences of understanding the imaginaries of the future has been stressed by Appadurai (2015), who extensively analyses the future in his book’s final section called ‘building the future’ (pp. 377–395). He points out that an anthropology focused on the understanding of future should pay attention to the interaction between three essential aspects: imagination, anticipation and aspiration. He explains that ‘as we refine the ways in which specific conceptions of aspiration, anticipation and imagination become configured so as to produce the future as a specific form or horizon we will be better able to place within this scheme more particular ideas about prophecy, well-being, emergency, crisis and regulation’ (p. 377). Appadurai affirms that ‘imagination is a vital resource in all processes and projects, and must be seen as a daily energy’ (p. 378) and draws up an itinerary to be followed for deepening and strengthening those social studies that account for the design of the future and its implications in topics such as the production of everydayness, the dynamics of the lived experience or the production of locality (p. 379). By confronting topics such as aspiration and politics of hope, risk and speculation, through a solid theoretical framework, the author makes the orientation that anthropology and social sciences must necessarily take toward the symbolic comprehension of how future is built very clear. Precisely, representing convergent imaginaries in the ‘construction of future’ may be uncommon and, as it is intangible, has been elusive to modern scientific knowledge. Our daily decisions are made based on the past, since it is tangible, what we see and touch and what we cling to; the past defines our spatiality and our materiality. Clinging to materiality is clinging to the past. We visualise the material space as we build it as past, which prevents us from seeing the future’s possible impacts, the way future operates in the present when making decisions, or how a vision affects a decision. Bryant and Knight (2019) had also worked about the imaginaries of the future from anthropology, considering six futural orientations: anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope and destiny. They proposed to incorporate the future as a method that ‘lend texture to our experience of the

2 This chapter contains sections which have been published in previous works, revised and rewritten for this book (Iparraguirre, 2019).

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

85

“now” and how we prepare the groundwork for the future in the present’ (2019, p. 193). The authors remark that ‘The study of the quotidian – the time of the everyday – is enriched by attention to varying depths of future time’, and the relevance ‘to orient anthropology toward orientations to help anthopologists to think about the indeterminate and open-ended teleologies of everyday life across scales of future imaginings’ (2019, p. 201). Anticipation allows a visualisation of the other half of the symbolic components that intervene in the decision-making process. There is a presence of the future that influences with equal strength as the presence of the past. Imaginaries of the future constitute half of the decision-making process; the other half is made up by imaginaries of the past. Anticipation, understood as the presence of the future, provides us with a new tool for considering the future as a source to understand the decisions we make in our becoming. In this sense and considering Appadurai’s thoughts, the future is a cultural fact that is missing from our life’s daily decisions. From the perspective of this work, the central concepts around anticipation enunciated in Poli (2019, p. 4) can be analysed as constitutive of a constellation of imaginaries, following the methodology that distinguishes the discursive categories, their symbolic components and their main constellations (Fig. 7). Here, this matrix is applied to understand the analytical use of anticipation in scientific discourse and practices, and what can its main virtues

Constellations (main imaginaries)

Components Categories (symbolic representations) (discursive concepts)

Temporality Future Prediction

System Model Scenarios

Culture Behaviour Decision making

Fig. 7. Scientific Imaginaries of Anticipation.

Expectation Predictive Discontinuity Foresight Forecast Development Latents Possible Forward looking Phenomenon Impredicative Predicative Future literacy Explorative Normative Research Decision Uncertainty Culture facts Imagination Aspiration Environment Perceive

86

Cultural Rhythmics

and limitations be. Poli (2019) recounts three levels of future studies, which in this context, entail three ways of imagining the future that can be interpreted based on the symbolic representations (components) that define their central categories. The first level, forecasting, condenses the imaginary of ‘prediction’ in the image of the ‘temporary window’, either as a ‘very short’ estimation (in econometric models) or as a ‘very long’ estimation (as the climate change models). Poli explains: ‘It is often quantitative, even point-based, and starts from an underlying assumption of continuity: the system under study will continue to work more or less as it has been working so far because its structure remains essentially the same, or the laws governing it remain the same’ (Poli, 2019, p. 4). The second level, foresight, groups a constellation of imaginaries around the production of possible futures with two central components: the quantitative and the dis-continuum. As for its practice, ‘foresight exercises are primarily used to challenge the mindset of decision makers by exploring possible futures. Alternatively, normative futures can be used. The difference between explorative scenarios and normative scenarios is that the former work in a forward attitude from the present to the future, whilst the latter work backward, from the future to the present’ (p. 4). Here the ‘normative’ and the ‘explorative’ are categories used commonly in an imaginary of a future with a lesser impact of the presence of the past. The third level, anticipation, shares categories and components with the two previous levels, and adds two new components: futures literacy and impredicativity (Miller, 2015). In the first two levels, notions of ‘continuity’ and ‘projection’, centred in the repetition of the past (past-based), reinforce the imaginary of becoming as presence exclusive to the past. The categories sustaining such argumentations are anchored in an asymmetric conception between past and future that reproduces another key imaginary of the hegemonic western temporality, the linearity of time’s arrow, from the past towards the future (Iparraguirre & Ardenghi, 2011). This third level, on the other hand, opens up an epistemological horizon to non-linear temporalities, such as those documented by anthropology of time (Carbonell, 2004; Evans-Pritchard, 1977; Fabian, 2002; Gell, 1992; Iparraguirre, 2011; Munn, 1992). Therefore, it allows an interpretation of becoming not centred in the past as the only ‘force’ able to account for how the future impacts in the becoming, from decision-making among humans to the biological development of all living creatures. In this table, the analysis is centred on three main imaginaries (future, model and behaviour), and systematised with only two components for each of them. Operationally, the matrix allows understanding that discursive

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

87

categories that refer to the notion of ‘future’ (expectation, predictive, foresight, etc.) can be de-naturalised by considering the different symbolic representations that bring together concepts such as ‘temporality’ and ‘prediction’. These components allow transitioning from a univocal concept of ‘future’ to a constellation of representations that configure the ‘imaginary of the future’ in a specific group depending on their temporalities. Putting anticipation into practice varies noticeably according to the interpretation of its categories (the same notion of ‘prediction’ can be used both for math calculations and for astrological estimations). Imagining anticipation with various components, even with shared constellations, entails various ways of exerting anticipation. The same procedure applied to the components of ‘model’ and ‘behaviour’ make up a triad of constellations that provides a rich symbolic material to analyse the ‘imaginary of anticipation’ anthropologically. For example, even if a constellation (set of imaginaries on behaviour) is shared among a group of decision-makers, when various components (representations on culture and decision-making) exist, the ways of exerting anticipation may differ: a passive or repressive behaviour facing a conflict of interests lies entirely in the cultural convictions of the group and on how authority is exerted in the decision chain. Finally, it is stressed that a relevant fact revealed by this matrix of imaginaries is that the concept ‘rhythm’ is not present among the scientific imaginaries on anticipation. This being said, in a previous work, Poli (2011) poses a direct implication between future and rhythms: ‘The seeds of the future are present not only in our expectations but also in the variety of natural and social rhythms that are reality itself – and perhaps especially in those that are less easily accessible’ (p. 72).

3.4.2 Rhythmics of Anticipation The rhythmics of anticipation can be understood as the set of rhythms and imaginaries that allows us to account for social processes, linking anticipatory practices. Simultaneously, they are entangled in anticipation imaginaries, which are contextualised in the study of the imaginaries of the future. These anticipatory practices are detected when observing actions, behaviours, attitudes and initiatives related to the ‘future’, that is, to the set of imaginaries regarding the future, such as development agendas, decision-making, risk, speculation and design, just to mention a few. As introduced in Chapter 2, cultural rhythmics are a methodology of analysis, diagnosis and intervention of social processes in multiple cultural contexts. For instance, rhythmics of development enables us to identify the

88

Cultural Rhythmics

various decisions and practices of development applied (being anticipatory or not) in the same territory – company, state or any organisation – when detecting that such practices have their roots in their participants’ imaginaries of development. Financial speculation, the frenzy of stock markets and the uncertainty of tomorrow’s economy are all expressions of the multiple forms adopted by the presence of the future and how these are revealed in anticipatory practices observable in the rhythmics of brokers, stock exchanges, and other tools for the management of the anticipation, which Appadurai mentions as ‘imaginaries of uncertainty’ (Appadurai, 2015, p. 316). Another rhythmic of anticipation is revealed in education, in the way of educating about the future. A knowledge that is taught-learnt on the basis of its past-based construction reduces its pedagogical capacity. Futures literacy, as Riel Miller states, is key to transferring didactics of how to incorporate the future as a symbolic and material element of our daily decisions. He explains: ‘Futures Literacy is a capability built on an understanding of the nature and attributes of anticipatory systems and processes. A Futures Literate person has the ability to select and deploy different anticipatory systems and processes, depending on aims and context’ (Miller, 2015, p. 515). The analysis of rhythmics in this process can contribute to what Miller calls ‘ability to make sense of discontinuity’ (p. 513), since rhythms are precisely grasped as discontinuities in our apprehension of time. It can also contribute to the deconstruction of an education conceived from a linear and cumulative temporality: ‘education, as it is practised today, dominated by aspirations to prepare and plan for the future inhibit the development and acquisition of Futures Literacy and may therefore be inimical to humanity’s capacity to understand complexity in all its richness, undermining diversification and diversification strategies for continued survival’ (p. 521). However, these rhythmics are anticipatory if they enable the apprehension of the presence of the future. Interpreting a daily work routine in an organisation under a criterion of distinction of activities naturalised as intrinsic to a routine (presence of the past) – clock schedules of entry and exit from work, task distribution and eating rituals, as many other habitus – does not account for the presence of the future at all. Nevertheless, the observation of the same routines, if de-naturalized, allows us to understand the existence of anticipation in planning, innovation, design of actions or objects not yet achieved. A social process in a tone of rhythms is anticipatory if its transference places the future in front of us. This clearly happens with music, when we listen to a combination of sounds not heard before (past) which sounds like something ‘new’ (future); new is that feeling of the future going through us. In recent decades, electronic music has

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

89

operated at the cutting edge of music creation, creating the possibility of creating music different from anything heard before. Even if the same situation has happened with all those genres that ‘surpassed’ their previous forms, it is possible to identify in certain periods, sets of imaginaries and rhythms, and in this case, artistic creations that allowed to visualise the future, anticipating what was about to happen. In jazz music, this happened with Miles Davis when he anticipated a fusion with rock, opening up the horizon for multiple subgenres of jazz rock and to legendary bands and artists such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, and Return to Forever, among others. The anticipation of a new age in tango was introduced by Astor Piazzolla in 1954 when he started his odyssey of creating the ‘new tango’, opening up this genre’s timbres and harmonies to the rest of the world. Today tango has been fused with jazz, rock, electronic music and numerous symphonic pieces. However, it is not a matter of making a retrospective of how these musicians influenced others after them. Influence may be well understood as ‘presence of the past’, thus hiding the other half of every social process. It is a matter of exemplifying that it is possible to observe the presence of the future and not only the presence of the past (how previous moulds were broken and a genre was desacralised, as it was pointed out in both cases). In these musicians’ creations – as well as with Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky and many other visionaries’ works – it is possible to identify a change with regard to the previous music that opened the horizon of futures to something yet unknown. In architecture, anticipation awakens a taste for the forms that renew the apprehension of space, our spatiality, to be precise. Zaha Hadid inspires the apprehension of space in a way that challenges native spatiality, jeopardising the beliefs of what a space for work, leisure, rest or any other kind of space should be. Putting values and conceptions at risk is a symptom of the presence of the future. This happened in the Renaissance period with Leonardo da Vinci, and later with the Italian futurists who conceived simultaneity as the future present in the space-time of technology, art and urbanism, and that is what Canevacci explores as ‘ubiquities’ (Canevacci, 2013). In a fruitful reflection on ‘singular objects’, Baudrillard and Nouvel (2003) refer to the cities of tomorrow, and Nouvel says: ‘Time, not space, will determine our being a part of urban life in the future’ (p. 73). 3.4.3 Presence of the Future and Governance Based on direct political experience for the extent of 6 years, I’ve been able to confirm that the design, planning and analysis of public policies are based on

90

Cultural Rhythmics

naturalised assumptions about time, planification, future, economy and culture.3 The way politicians make their daily governance decisions, culturally founded in a linear temporality and an imaginary of becoming centred, both on the emergent and the urgent, entails a specific, basically non-anticipatory agenda. The constitution of an agenda is inevitable, even if the actors have not resolved to do so or consider it irrelevant. The agenda is automatically created by correlating daily actions and the annual calendar in a process that demarcates the administrative and bureaucratic rhythmic (administration’s beginning and closing, budget construction and approval, legislative term, electoral processes, voting, etc.). As Durkheim stated: ‘A calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularities’ (Durkheim, 1982, p. 9). That is to say, the combination of the local political rhythmic and the state calendrical rhythmic produces the development agenda of the territory concerned, reproducing their decision-makers’ temporality. I stress that this is a development agenda, and not just a political agenda, since this lacks ontology without the former. This can be extrapolated into a vast number of decision-making groups in territories of Argentina, and Latin America in general, as the imaginaries of development and their correlated governance practices (political rhythmics) have a colonial epistemological matrix; that is, they share the way the presence of the past conditions decision-making. This matrix, still persisting under the imaginary of nation state – of the imagined communities according to Anderson (1993) – is a clear example of how the past becomes present in government systems and in social conflicts never defused or transcended after appealing to methods created for actors and situations that no longer exist. From family farming to tax reforms, and from military dictatorships to the devaluation of national currencies, policies that do not acknowledge socio-cultural and territorial diversities fail to find homogeneous solutions for an alleged totality (of citizens, neighbourhoods, towns, and even countries). Latin American societies are governed by the presence of the past because we do not recognise the future as a force capable of transforming our present, both in our own family and in our own country. Rituals that link us to traditions for sustaining identity are, in the same way, the denial of a dynamic identity, open to changes that societies produce in any case.

3 The Barcelona Declaration on Time Policies is a recent European initiative that state 10 propositions to declare that time is a political issue and that can be conceptualized as a right for all citizens (Barcelona Time Use Initiative, 2022).

Rhythmics of Development in Argentina

91

Present examples of micro- and macro-politics that can be quoted abound, such as municipal budget dependence on federal resources, concentration of economic capital in major urban centres, perpetuation of provincial feudal-like power structures, the ungovernable size of territories that reproduce colonial administrations, and imperial cities such as Mexico City, Santiago (Chile), São Paulo (Brazil), or Buenos Aires (Argentina) that reproduce this ‘imaginary of governance’ and are unable to succeed at tackling issues regarding overpopulation, social inequality and lack of planning (drug trafficking, violence, crime, extreme poverty, housing deprivation, epidemics). Another clear example of an anticipatory political rhythmic and a synchronisation of agendas is science applied to political governance. Science reflects on prediction and uses knowledge to anticipate results; it has since its genesis. From a different perspective, politics also aim to anticipate social facts, being either elections or minimum gestures that make for the clarity of the administration and its execution. The imaginary of administration is precisely a constellation of symbolic components around future, improvidence, emergence, categories and practices that vary between the coming and what becomes daily. Every anticipatory practice within politics is usually thought of as ‘prevention’: preventing fires, diseases, floods, deficits, strikes, poverty, absenteeism, attrition and every ‘social evil’ that adversely affects governance and citizens as well. Then, in this conflict-saturated horizon, there is the inevitable leak of strategies of the future, some anticipatory ones, some others that are predictable and some retrogressive ones. Therefore, the challenge is to set up a dialogue between the art of doing science and the art of doing politics – as Bourdieu (2007) and Latour (2007) stated – in which anticipation is a bridge, a connective language between the imaginaries of the future and the past. The diametrical change of governance involved in using the presence of the future for building anticipatory political rhythmics opens up the way to creative, innovative, sustainable and resilient decision-making, which ontologically entails another temporality. This anticipatory temporality can be described first as non-accumulative (since the past is no longer the exclusive source of knowledge) and as coming (since it assumes its main input is the energy of the present moment for the apprehension of the social emergence, both individually and collectively). In this sense, the urgency becomes an agency, a conductible emergence, manageable by local resources. Decision-making groups such as officials, politicians, businessman, entrepreneurship and academics could use these tools to change the way they manage territories, economy, energy resources and organisations.

4 DESIGN OF DEVELOPMENT AGENDAS

I end this book with concrete anthropological proposals for intervention applied to social and technological development. The main considerations of the work are reviewed on based on the discussion about the necessary and urgent dialogue between science and politics, between the ethnographic planning of development, the design of public policies and agendas, and its execution in territories with local and global perspectives.1 The methodologies of interpretation already described are applied to the analysis of the overarching concepts present in this work (development, territory, progress, heritage, becoming, time, space, policy, agendas) and the results obtained are reviewed in the more general context of the sociocultural dynamics of territorial development. Among the main results obtained, it is arguable that the ‘territorial development’ formula is a clear example of how social imaginaries are constructed on the basis of the spatiality and temporality of the social actors that mobilize them. Another result is the rhythmical characterization of the territory that proposes articulating symbols and practices, imaginaries and rhythmics. In all the cases studied, it was possible to find rhythmics of management, whether patrimonial, political, touristic or agricultural. The existence of these rhythmics of management, which are operative and executive to organize, diagnose and plan, are a concrete result which shows that the observation of rhythmics enables characterizing social groups. From the general framework presented (Fig. 8), we can understand how agendas are built and how anticipation plays its role as a tool for promoting changes. A way to understand the possibility of producing changes in future scenarios can be built based on interventions in the temporality of

1 Further ideas in this direction are presented in a recent article about policies for time studies (Iparraguirre, 2022).

93

Design of Development Agendas

95

discussing the way in which interventions made in the decision-making groups temporality can generate changes in how we understand tomorrow, based on the imaginaries and the value of future. The future, as a dimension of time, is the source of all human action and, therefore, what allows the production of value, be it social, political, economic or any other. The STOB model proposes that the value we assign to the future when conceiving it asymmetrically from the past can be re-signified through anticipation studies because they allow us to visualize the ‘other half’ of the symbolic components that intervene in any decision-making process. The presence of the future affects any decision with the same relevance as the presence of the past, and allows us to conceive a symmetric valuation that produces anticipatory agendas. The STOB model combines the theory about time and temporality presented in Chapter 1 with the anthropological methodology about cultural rhythmics and ultimately, anticipation studies presented in Chapter 2 and 3. Figure 8 summarizes the general diagram of the model, whose explanation is presented as follows. The main axis to read the diagram is the column ‘Dimension’. The dimensions of time (future, present, past) organize all the concepts on both sides of the diagram: to the left we have the theory, to the right, the method. The three dimensions are the link between time and temporality (see Chapter 1.1). On the left side, the ‘Phenomenon of becoming’ column resumes the ontology level, from a phenomenological perspective of time that connects the apprehension of time (protention, tension, retention) with the cognition (imagination, ideas, memory). On the right, we see an outline of the cultural rhythmics methodology for studying temporalities through the symbolic capabilities to imagine and to communicate, that is imaginaries and discourses in combination with the practical capabilities manifested in the social rhythms and the spatialities (imagined spaces, local/ global territories). Following Husserl (1959) and Heidegger’s (1997) philosophical writings, the STOB model postulates that becoming can be understood as an articulation of protention, tension and retention. Every temporality is an interpretation of becoming and entails the triple distinction known as past, present and future. The future, as a dimension of time, is the source of all human action through the construction of a temporality. Therefore, what allows the production of value, be it social, political, economic or any other, is the future. As a dimension of any temporality, the future is not a univocal category nor a unique imaginary, it is apprehended as part of a cultural context. This model proposes that the value assigned to the future when conceiving it asymmetrically from the past can be re-signified through anticipation studies, which allow us to visualize the ‘other half’ of the symbolic components that intervene

96

Cultural Rhythmics

in any decision-making process. The symmetrical tension between past and future that maintains the phenomenological becoming of time is translated in terms of temporality, in the tension (of valuations) that oscillates between asymmetries centred on the past and centred on the future. The way to achieve symmetrical tension in decision-making is to achieve the presence of the future, that is anticipation (Iparraguirre, 2019). As we see in Fig. 9, becoming could be represented, simultaneously, as a vertical and as a horizontal flow of time. For the classic diachronic axis that express the sequence (t0, t1, t2), the STOB model adds the future and the past of each moment considered (t2 is future of t1, t1 is present, t0 is past of t1) on the synchronic axis. In this example, t1 is the result of a symmetric tension of t2 (its future) and t0 (its past). This visualization discards the linear arrow of time going from past to future as the only way to represent the flow of time and proposes two opposite directions that collide into the present (‘descending’ from future and ‘ascending’ from the past). The STOB model argues that our brain is able to project and idea into the future because the mind becomes, and this becoming is a simultaneous tension between the past and the future, a symmetrical tension of memory and imagination. The imaginaries of the future are in tension, colliding with memory and experience, which are the imaginaries of the past. Thus, for this model the future has the ability to balance the value of the past.

Fig. 9. STOB Graphic to Represent a Symmetrical Past-Future Flow of Time.

Design of Development Agendas

97

Decision-making processes imply the synchronization of any temporality’s three tensions. This means it is possible to diagnose which problems belong to the past and which are current, as well as imagining which would appear in the future. The model allows us to transform the action of planning and designing agendas, while incorporating the value of the future into the equation of considering the value of the past asymmetrically and predominantly. For example, an urbanization plan that doesn’t consider which people will live in the new area and what are they thinking now about this possible future. Urbanists used to project spatial parameters for this new area or region without considering who would live there, and which imaginaries of the future those people already had. Now, this is the presence of the future (see Chapter 3.4.3). Decisions are taken now, not tomorrow, not 50 years in the future. In short, the presence of the future affects any decision with the same relevance as the presence of the past and allows us to conceive a symmetric valuation. Considering the theoretical framework of the STOB model, how it is feasible to conceive and recognize this symmetric valuation? How is it possible to apply this theory of time to pragmatic actions such as agenda design? As it was presented in Chapter 2, the Cultural Rhythmics method combines social imaginaries and social rhythms, focusing on the generation of not-yet-stable knowledge (the imaginaries of the future), instead of only on past experience. Linear temporality naturalizes past experience both as the basis of decisions and the denial of visions and anticipations. The design of agendas is precisely the individual and collective practice where the imbrication between temporalities and cultures materializes, that is between different cultural rhythmics.

4.2 AGENDA DESIGN, TEMPORALITY AND CULTURE Why is it necessary to study the design of agendas based on their temporality, on their structuring of time? After 20 years of research, I discovered the importance of studying the notions of time involved in development agendas by investigating the link between development practices and the temporalities that organize them. Later, from my position as a public official in charge of planning the municipal government (see Chapter 3.4), I was able to face the challenge of designing political organization instruments that allowed balancing emerging social needs with medium and long-term strategies. This path defined the design of agendas and public policy as a research object whose results should be operative for political praxis.

Cultural Rhythmics

98

The answer to the previous question is based on a hypothesis: every decision implies an agenda. The agenda, as symbolic instrument intended to make diachronic or synchronic decisions, compiles and organizes the decision-making of an individual or a group of people, even when it is not defined as an ‘agenda’. The simple act of proceeding without planning produces an arrangement, a series of actions and decisions, that, when executed, generate, in the same moment, an agenda. Thus, the design of agendas becomes an inexorable issue to analyze if we assume that agendas produce development through their own dynamics, which imply temporalities. Therefore, agendas materialize into temporalities by ordering processes and actions in decision-making, but they also become spatialities when they order the uses and meanings of the space in which such actions will be carried out. Thus, it is possible to correlate these core concepts (agenda, temporality, cultural decentring, planning mode) in a systemic way that operates as a matrix for designing agendas. Fig. 10 summarizes how these core concepts allow us to characterize agendas, starting with the difference between asymmetric and symmetric presented above. In temporality terms, asymmetric agendas could be the result

Agenda characterization

Temporality

Past-centred asymmetry

Past-Future Symmetry

Future-centred asymmetry (projection of the future)

(presence of the past)

(presence of the future)

Cultural decentring

Fixed traditional identities

Balanced, sustainable and open identities

Unfixed fluctuating identities

Planning mode

Predictive and speculative

Anticipatory

Projective

Examples

Argentinean housing and development agendas

Norwegian energetic and education agendas

Dubai touristic and urbanistic agendas

Fig. 10. STOB Characterization for Designing Agendas.

Design of Development Agendas

99

of practices centred in the past, in previous experiences which are uncritically reproduced. The opposite case, which puts the focus on the future, supposes that the act of planning and producing agendas which organize and contextualize such planning acquire different modalities, such as forecast, foreseeing, prediction, anticipation, among others (Fuller, 2019; Miller, Poli, & Rossel, 2018; Poli, 2019). The symmetric agendas promote a balance between the past and the future. In terms of cultural decentring, the differences are manifested in how identities are linked to a static past, to an open and unstable future, or to a balance between both extremes: an equilibrium between historical and new, social and economic. Regarding the planning modes, those centred in the past produce predictive and speculative strategies, future-centred modes produce projections of desired scenarios and symmetric modes produce anticipatory tools. Therefore, it is useful to review specific examples of how this model could be applied in designing and analyzing operative agendas.

4.2.1 Past Centred Asymmetr y The Latin American government’s lack of planning is a general example of asymmetric valuation centred in the past. It shows us that decisions are made, in most cases, based on the presence of the past, justified predominantly by the value of experience (Bourqia & Sili, 2021; INTA, 2008; Levy Yeyati, 2017; ´ ´ Mattar & Cuervo, 2017; Medina Vasquez, Becerra, & Castaño, 2014; Min´ 2016; Naciones Unidas, 2013, 2018a, 2018b). The isterio de Educacion, incapacity of changing urbanization an improving housing and well-being could be translated as and incapacity to integrate the value of the future with the local value of the past. The neglect of the sociocultural dimension in government planning is epistemologically rooted in an element which is present in agendas throughout the continent: the constant of planning public policies based on the experience of the past unilaterally, ignoring the imaginaries of the future. For example, slums behind the highways in an overpopulated city like Buenos Aires, show a clear example of lack of urbanistic planning, which manifests through past-centred mobilities and urbanistic agendas. The one-sided perspective towards the economy and infrastructure evidences a temporality and a spatiality that neglects the socio-cultural dimension of development, in which the value of the future (dreams, wishes, desires, expectations) is formed. Development processes that integrate this dimension, though require infrastructure of roads, buildings, mobility and access to resources, should not exhaust their

100

Cultural Rhythmics

impact on the work itself, on the built object, but use them to convey knowledge, traditions, identity, health, well-being, that is, what defines and sustains every social group. The design of a municipal strategic plan in Argentina between the years of 2015 and 2017 with a horizon on 2020 turned out to be a direct experience of the contradictions that are produced when considering the influence of the past and the future asymmetrically. In dialogue with development agendas produced in recent years by national and international organizations (Levy Yeyati, ´ 2016; Naciones Unidas, 2018a, 2018b) to 2017; Ministerio de Educacion, name just a few, the objective was to generate the first Development Agenda for the Municipality of Tornquist. This compiled the planning work focused on the elaboration of a medium-term strategic development tool, called ‘Tornquist 2020 Strategic Plan’. The methodology used was a combination of theoretical elements and experiences which emerge from daily practice. Epistemologically, this Plan was not just a manual, nor a prescriptive document of what the Municipality should do in the coming years. This process resulted in a Development Agenda that added citizen participation to strategic planning and the emerging of daily demands in the political-economic realm, both at provincial and national level. Prior to management stage, this Plan received its main diagnostic input from my doctoral research on development anthropology in the district (Iparraguirre, 2017) and the neighbouring region of the southwest of Buenos Aires Province, which includes an analysis of academic works referring to the development and construction of agendas in the region and in Tornquist District. During the first stage of management, work was done towards preparing organization charts that would allow us to know and organize the human resources of the Municipality. Subsequently, the content was produced through socializing the purpose of the plan in cabinet meetings and specific encounters with officials and work teams, adjusting the planning according to the emergence of unforeseen problems. From this exchange between the Development Agency, the advisers and the other secretariats, as well as the participation in mayors’ forums and multiple efforts in provincial and national ministries, the four strategic axes of management emerged: urban development, sociocultural development, public health development and touristic-productive development. For example, the ‘urban development’ axis of the Plan had its epicentre in the revision and modification of the Territorial Land Use Code, carried out in 2002 (Ordenanza No 1.461, 2002). In accordance with the priority social demand to enable touristic investments in urban and rural areas not favoured by said regulations, the prospective process of this reorganization was to create

Design of Development Agendas

101

a balance between the records of rejected investments and new ones requested (approved in general through exceptions), and the future visions regarding: demographic growth, the increase in the annual income of tourists, the search for a higher quality of life, open and closed urbanization projects, and connectivity between the touristic centres and the emitting cities. The growth of commercial, touristic and productive activities that has occurred in the District during the last 10 years (presence of the past) has generated a demand for new areas, activities and uses required to promote and strengthen the SMEs linked to them (present), which in order to be consummated required a legislative framework (public policy) that expresses and promotes the conditions of those possibilities (presence of the future).2 In the touristic-productive axis, the development of a regional tourism brand which transcended the District limits produced by the Municipal borders (management, logistics, regulations, policies) turned out to be a social experiment of resistance and innovation that clearly polarized the interests centred on past imaginations with those centred on the future. The name of the brand ‘Ventania’ proposed by the Municipality to the private sector, as an alternative to ‘Sierra de la Ventana Touristic Region’, prompted multiple meetings, debates and even discussions between officials and businessmen regarding representations such as ‘touristic identity’, ‘history of the region’, ‘national recognition’, and other similar ones that evidenced a confrontation between temporalities and aesthetic or commercial criteria. At the participatory level, this Plan was nurtured by the multiple meetings with neighbours which were held during 2016 and 2017, to carry out the Participatory Budget Programme. With an intensive presence in the territory, in each one of the District’s six localities, an exchange was achieved with the community that fulfilled the requirements established by the participatory methodologies of a strategic plan. It turned out to be an inexhaustible source of citizen proposals that allowed forming a social interest projects agenda, several of which were carried out even without later having won the election. Through them, it was possible to know directly what their dreams, desires, initiatives and concrete proposals for each locality were; that is to say, their imaginaries of the future. The socialization of the 2020 Plan was conveyed in the introduction of each of these meetings during 2016, giving a brief explanation of the relevance of having a 2020 Plan. Multiple pooling meetings were also held regarding specific issues of the Plan, particularly about urban and touristic development with tourism associations, chambers of commerce, counsellors and investors interested in future developments. 2 Small to Medium Enterprise.

Cultural Rhythmics

102

In the context of planning the 2016 and 2017 annual budgets, the preparation of budget policies was another relevant addition with the objective of putting the strategic guidelines, the annual objectives of each Secretariat and their correlation with the amount assigned to each department into words. The exercise of creating a budget with regards to future actions proposed by each official turned out to be an innovation for the accounting logic up to that moment. Until then, budgets were created by reproducing a format already stabilized, which entailed increasing the strictly envisaged percentages with economic conditions in similar proportions (total availability of the resource and projected inflation percentage). For the accounting logic focused on the presence of the past, the projection of expenditure ends up being the exclusive criterion for future intervention, as it is considered the determining fact of any other design or anticipation possibility. Even when it is an abstract and speculative value, its incidence is retroactive because the criterion is built from past experience and not from future vision. This explains why public management lacks anticipatory practices and tends to reproduce the same ‘errors’ cyclically (budget deficit, inflation lag, neglected rates, unfinished work, obsolete machinery, computer obsolescence, late training of human resources). These shortcomings are usually grouped together under the sole problem of a lack of economic resources, which is not a sufficient argument since there are plenty of examples, at least in Argentina, that show how, in the face of favourable economic periods, public administrations have reproduced the same errors and even worsened the situation in proportion with the disposal of greater resources. In sum, as many of Latin American development agendas, this Plan was a linear plan centred in the value of the past, with a projective perspective of possible horizons, disconnected in many aspects from the imagined future. However, systematizing these future designs and intervention processes during the management process as an official in charge of the Municipal Development Agency has provided the necessary perspective to face a new planning process, of a greater scope, with a horizon in 2030. The experience of this past-centred planning practice, and the analysis of its daily implications, has produced the conditions for the design of a ‘2030 Municipal Agenda’ that strives to compensate the past with the future and does not tend to simply reproduce what was planned until 2020 and what has been experienced up to date (see Chapter 4.2.3).

4.2.2 Future Centred Asymmetr y Another case of asymmetric valuation of time, but centred in the future, is explicit in cities like Dubai. A brief stay in the United Arab Emirates in 2018,

Design of Development Agendas

103

when visiting Dubai and Abu Dhabi, allowed me to rethink the relationship between identity, culture and temporality. Sitting in a cafe in the Dubai Mall, at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, I visualized a concept that I had never thought of before: cultures need to be decentred to know their centre. This allowed me to think about the fact that culture is never a fixed point, but rather a fluctuating one that the becoming produces between what has been and what has not yet been. Culture is, being, a process rather than a place; it is a social dynamic rather than a static image or an object. We associate culture with space because we think of it as static, an aspect or cultural trait that is sustained by its chronology, its antiquity, that is its past. This is typical in studies and in the management of cultural heritage and tourism that promotes to consume the past identity. This is precisely what does not happen in Dubai, since what is consumed is an identity of the future, not yet consolidated, in process, in liquidity, composed of other past cultures that no longer are attractive by themselves, but by their simultaneity of states (Zaidan, 2016). A preliminary idea of the cultural decentring manifested in Dubai was statement in a previous work: […] where superposition of future states around the world can be condensed into a single city and under the same consumption concept: here you can experience the future of the whole world simultaneously. An Arab culture with a presence of the past crystallized for millennia, went on to decentralize from its own tradition and turn to cultural forms of an extreme capitalism where everything can be sold because the value comes from the urgent exchange of cultures-tourists-businesses-flights. Fishing, oil and species (historical heritage) were relegated to the attraction of a combination of elements and symbols (religion, mathematics, architecture, highways, hotels, cars, buildings, airplanes, fashion) that incessantly produce the feeling of living at the edge of the future. Dubai exemplifies today, in an extreme way, that cultural decentring manifests itself in the production of value through the consumption of what is to come. (Iparraguirre, 2021, p. 70) When we think about cultural movement, innovation, the avant-garde, what is happening, we are facing culture as becoming, as an imminent change in our temporality, facing the future; in short, to culture and time. A city-product like Dubai faces us with a notion of culture that is decentred from its past and asymmetrically oriented towards the future. A value of the future

104

Cultural Rhythmics

produced by those who visit it – 20 million tourists a year (Zaidan, 2016) – and therefore energize it, giving life to its inevitable change, transformation and creativity (Landry, 2012). Then, cultural decentring in terms of agenda faces us with the challenge of planning without a fixed centre, without anchoring to the past, with a decentralized planning of past knowledge, to the point that it can ignore the social impact on its population and the impact of such actions on the constitutive elements of its culture (Stephenson & Ali-Knight, 2010; Zaidan, 2016). That is, an extreme valuation of the future over the past can generate a socio-cultural rupture for those who must inhabit that planned future, whether they are native, foreign or transitory residents. As Gokce Gunel points out in his work on energy, climate change and urban design in Abu Dhabi, there are contradictory versions of the future in these cities, for example on some of the vast economic mega-projects that characterize them: It is important to note, however, that half-finished infrastructures do not always carry or convey the same effects. They oriented the producers of Masdar toward a future through practices of speculative forecasting, and they have given rise to different and at times contradictory versions of that future. For some, the future of Masdar is a ruin that operates as an amusement park. For others, the future is a special economic zone, perhaps devoid of the various half-finished technological artifacts, but still invested in a business plan around renewable energy and clean technology. In effect, potential does not necessarily induce a linear temporal movement toward the completion of projects in the way that was intended, but rather an assemblage of varying, overlapping, and contradictory trajectories. ¨ (Gunel, 2019, p. 25) Dubai manifests a future-oriented cultural decentring to produce a global consumption product beyond its own local traditions. In this sense, Dubai exemplifies an urbanistic and touristic agenda that is asymmetrically future centred. Other cities with similar conditions are Beijing, Shanghai and Mumbai, considering that Charles Landry states: ‘These are strategic places and communication nodal points that have a direct effect and influence on world affairs economically, culturally and politically, where global agendas are created, facilitated and enacted’ (Landry, 2012, p. xix). Fan Yang postulates a similar approach when analyzing the relationship between temporality

Design of Development Agendas

105

and urbanism of Shenzhen city in China that could be extended to the ‘global South’: What a temporality-based approach offers instead is a more critical lens through which to comparatively analyse the many Asian locales that, despite their vast differences, share the experience of fast-paced urbanization, high population density, blurred urban–village boundaries, and a diffused informal economy […] paying analytical attention to the heterogeneous and oftentimes interlinked temporalities of Asian cities not only opens up the possibility to defy Eurocentric perspectives on modernity and urbanism but also offers critical resources for generating alternative visions for global (and Asian) futures. (Fang, 2017, p. 207)

4.2.3 Anticipator y Agendas As I mentioned in Chapter 4.2.1, since 2019, I’ve been working on a planning instrument with a symmetric valuation, an anticipatory agenda called Agenda Tornquist 2030 (Ordenanza No 137/21, 2021). It summarizes six prioritized SDGs to structure the Municipality’s Agenda with a horizon in 2030. Although several of the 17 SDGs (Naciones Unidas, 2018) could have been considered as priorities, the selection responds not only to structural issues of management and territory but also to their pedagogical utility, that is that the scheme can be accessible and clear for multiple actors, such as officials, employees and neighbours. Zero Hunger (SDG No 2) was considered a management objective based on not allowing hunger to exist in a District with only 25,000 inhabitants and consolidating itself as one of the vectors of social development policy. Health and Well-being (SDG No 3) demarcates the axis of an environmental policy that integrates human health in a broader framework of ‘territorial health’, where water, soil, air and all-natural resources that integrate social and environmental well-being are considered. Quality Education (SDG No 4) is a cross-sectional objective at all educational levels, not only pedagogically but also regarding the infrastructure necessary to give classes. It also includes a grant programme to assist vulnerable students, the strategy to coordinate territorial content with the Provincial Government agencies and a federalization of the educational offer in the three largest cities. Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG No 8) is aimed at strengthening formal work and the

106

Cultural Rhythmics

generation of employment as a result of tourism, agriculture and industries. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG No 9) defines the strategy of promoting the establishment of new companies, as happened with renewable energy generators, in addition to promoting the arrival of new segments such as the knowledge industry, telecommunications, software design etc. Sustainable Cities and Communities (No 11) is the SDG that condenses, for the Municipality, the purpose of having better services every day for citizens, the neighbours, the tourists and the producers, in terms of energy, cleaning, recycling, urbanization, transit, security, accessibility, tourist attractions, among others. These objectives outline a general conceptual framework upon which the strategic axes and government actions of each Secretary is built. This allows structuring all macro decision-making instruments under the same criteria, such as the annual budget, budgetary policies and tax legislation. The selection of these SDGs responds to having ‘sociocultural development’ as a central purpose, so that each one is a structuring axis of government actions and does not reproduce the programmatic inertia that each government area has by its denomination and its historical burden (presence of the past). On the contrary, when management is focused on the presence of the future, the practice of each area of government must turn its management to the common purpose of promoting socio-cultural development and mobilizing its resources to achieve it. Of course, the agenda design does not exhaust the possibilities of its infeasibility or unsuccessful application. It is inevitable that when applying it to the territory, human player factors and tactical schemes come into play, leading to variations from what was expected. However, such ‘unforeseen’ factors must be considered as new inputs generated on the border between becoming and future, between concrete action and what is imagined. A first public policy designed with the STOB model, which arises from the new 2030 Agenda with an anticipatory perspective, is the design of an employment programme called ‘Learning 1 Working’.3 Its purpose is to achieve the progressive recovery of territorial culture. This programme defines a policy of work and education at the same time, which postulates that it is no longer possible to sustain a linear model of education as a requisite for work, that is ‘educate first, work later’, but that education must be imparted simultaneously with training for work, in the same act. The implementation of this programme requires the simultaneous actions of various areas of the Secretary of Development, all oriented under the same scheme of producing 3 Personal regular communications with Prof. Vico Frattini, Consultant at Municipality of Tornquist. The complete theoretical empirical discussion is part of an ongoing public policy.

Design of Development Agendas

107

tools that open the future (through work and education) while supporting food and housing conditions which allow training a citizen who, in addition to studying, learns to work. Its implementation foresees different budgetary strategies so that the programme can grant scholarships to young people who work and study simultaneously in the context of their jobs. Likewise, the programme articulates the passage from a social policy focused on assistance (past) to another that, based on assistance, opens the horizon of social promotion (future). The incorporation of this programme in the government agenda implies the need for a higher level of articulation between the areas with synergistic actions aimed at the construction and generation of employment. In short, social promotion implies the generation of alternatives, opening the future and symmetrically building forms of community participation that imply higher levels of socio-cultural and productive inclusion. Other specific examples of anticipatory agendas could be found in Norway. In 2019, I had the opportunity to visit the Oslo Energy Institute (UiO:Energy) where I learned about the different ‘strategic initiatives’ that University of Oslo actually has (Sustainable Energy; Life Science; Nordic Experiences), and details of two anticipatory agendas, called the ‘City Studio’ programme and the ‘INCLUDE’ programme. City Studio integrates Universities, colleges, students and the City Government in an education platform that connects disciplines and institutions to face challenges that occur in the city. It is an experiential education platform that connects disciplines and institutions to frame and face challenges occurring in the City of Oslo. Through this collaborative process, projects led by students will provide value for the city, while they learn the skills they need to succeed in today’s economy and inspire action in the community and government. Regarding INCLUDE (Inclusive Decarbonisation and Energy Transition), it is a centre for socially inclusive solutions through co-creation with stakeholders. Their partners are Municipalities, County Councils, Commercial actors, NGOs and State Agencies. It also has an international partner, the Durham University, with associated partners like Durham County Council and Durham Energy Institute. Its purpose is to produce ‘anticipated societal impact through co-creation’ and ‘anticipations beyond societal impact’. Simone Abram has studied how multiple temporalities are performed in ongoing projects of democratic planning in Norway and Sweden, arguing that ‘conflicting temporal frames characterize contemporary urban and infrastructural planning, and that widespread forms and norms of social mediation adopted by planners falter through a lack of theoretical and practical attention to temporal contradictions’ (Abram, 2014, p. 130). In the specific case of Norway, she mentioned that:

108

Cultural Rhythmics

… a recent law on planning in Norway proposes that each municipality should adopt a planning-strategy within a year of local elections, identifying strategic choices over social development (including long-term land-use, environmental challenges, and the need for further plans) […] It does not replace the ambitious requirement for all Norwegian municipalities to produce comprehensive medium and long-term development plans, however. On the contrary, the new planning-strategy must take account of existing municipal plans, but while planning-strategies require broad public debate, they do not entail the same strict procedural inclusion, information and consultation procedures as municipal plans. How the four-year term of the planning strategy affects the twenty-year horizon of municipal planning remains to be seen, but it would appear that the planning strategy is a means to fill the near-future with ever more alternative forms of organization rather than to empty it out. (Abram, 2014, p. 133) This general state planning strategy that Norway has for a 20-year projection and its articulation of the 4-year municipal plans allows us to understand why its institutions can achieve agendas that promote appreciation of the future as shown by the aforementioned examples of UiO:Energy, and their various ways of activating the presence of the future, either to ‘achieve social inclusion in the energy agenda’ or in the transition from carbon to renewable energies, to ‘restructure the research community’, or to ‘expand the collaboration beyond Norway’. A central concept for both programmes is ‘co-creation’, a collaborative initiative to use and transform the value of the future towards producing anticipatory agendas. Another example is the social impact of energy. From 2017 to 2019, due to my position in the municipality, I have been in contact with the ongoing construction of three wind farms inside the District. The prospective farms are licenced to cover 300 MW only in this District, and the whole region expects to see more than 1,500 MW with the construction of 15 wind farms. From this double position mentioned, as official and as a researcher simultaneously, I studied the impacts of the transition to a ‘low carbon society’ and the strategies that could change the ways that agenda planning is conceived based on the presence of the future. The objectives of this ethnography seek to produce knowledge to be utilized as tools in the field of Anthropology, as well as planning and energy. In order to achieve these objectives, I studied the social imaginaries about future and energy in different decision-making groups, as a

110

Cultural Rhythmics

modelling of different ways of designing the future. The study of the impacts of energy in society and the strategies that could change the ways that agenda planning is conceived among decision-makers remains as the main purpose of this ‘energetic agenda’. I agree here with the words of Gordon Walker regarding the agendas of de-energization from a rhythm-analytical perspective: … can we live in ways that are less entangled with techno-energetic rhythms, more connected with rhythm-energies outside of these energy systems and more synchronized with times, temporalities and rhythms that have the capacity to counter patterns of fracture and harm in human and ecological life? (Walker, 2021, p. 161) If our political decisions are no longer thought of as clinging to the past, then we begin to understand that the intervention in nature and its resources has an unknown possibility if considering the future as a source of energy. Resilience is also a way of conceiving the future as an energy carrier, instead of assuming that our planet is an infinite and renewable resource. Additionally, to conceive it as renewable entails the presumption that its origin (past) will be the same in the future, which is another way of reproducing a sequential and cumulative temporality. If it is assumed that the energy sources are being in the future, then the connection with materials and resources changes. Water could be conceived as energy and not only as a chemical compound in an industrial chain; food, as energy providing access to the future and not only as appropriation of the past and the resources that generated it; and property, as a transitory habitat and not only as accumulation of power conditioning access to the proper space. Thus, territory ceases to be a space of the past to which I must return to defend it (wars, invasions, colonies) and becomes the place where the future is revealed, where vital energy is possible and hence, life can be sustained. The discovery and development of energy from fossil fuels are the product of a temporality centred on the past; fossil resources are accessible because they lie in the past. Renewable energies, such as wind and solar power, instead express an anticipatory energy that takes the resilience of systems into account. Sun and wind are coming resources. Resources are in the future, and they can only be ‘captured’ in the becoming, which makes them unpredictable while, simultaneously, less polluting. The systems of their ‘capture’ are anticipatory as they enable transformation of the resource without a spatial accumulation for which its control entails the consumption and pollution of other resources.

Design of Development Agendas

111

Anticipation reveals that the future is symmetric to the past, as the future is not reduced to projections set in motion on the basis of previous static knowledge. The past is never on its own or isolated. It only works in tension with the future which provides it with coming energy. It is as simple as understanding that death disconnects the body from the future. A dead body is only past, matter with no access to the energy source. This energy is not just from the brain or the heart, but they give access and movement to the future, to time and to becoming. It is the symmetric tension between the past and future that supports the present and its actualization in physical terms. At the sociological level, social processes are the tension between socio-imaginary forces, experience and vision. The idea of becoming as actualization explains social processes from a different logic: our decisions are not projections but actualizations of the being-there (Heidegger, 1997), and therefore, the epistemology is not on the weight of the past towards the future (entropic arrow) but on the force exerted by the future on the becoming, the presence of the future. Our greatest social and personal strength comes from the future, from the void created by our visions of what we are not yet and what we expect to be based on previous experience. However, the strength is not given in isolation by experience and memory. Phenomenologically, the future opens up the horizon of the present, and it is the source of our strength for becoming, that is for waking up every day and making a set of decisions in our lives always based on a symmetric tension between the past and future, experience and vision, origin and destiny – or telos (Bryant & Knight, 2019).4

4.3 THE VALUE OF THE FUTURE FOR PUBLIC POLICY The different agendas studied (Fig. 10) express different temporalities that we can characterize based on different cultural rhythmics. The examples in three different places (Buenos Aires, Oslo, Dubai) highlight the relevance of understanding how the design of agendas is embedded in temporalities, that is in the way that social groups order the ‘passage of time’ and organize their everyday life around the valuation of the dimensions of time, whether centred

4 This book is a great study to consider ‘futural orientations’ to ‘help us gain an ethnographic hold on the relationship between the future and action, including the act in imagining the future’ (Bryant & Knight, 2019, p. 16).

112

Cultural Rhythmics

on the past, the future or the present: what I have here called anticipatory agendas. The discussion that this chapter opens, following the question of how cultures use ideas of the future to act in the present, is that if decisions in the design of agendas cease to be conceived as anchored only in the past, then decision-makers begin to understand that the intervention on societies and resources has an unknown possibility in considering the future as the main source of our imagination and any process of valuation (economical, energetic, financial, artistic, political, social, among others). The purpose of the STOB model presented and its applications to anticipation studies is to make the future accessible through the design of agendas, policy-making and social impact studies, shaping anticipatory practices and networks. To explore this purpose, three modes of agenda design were presented: past-centred asymmetry; future-centred asymmetry; and anticipatory agendas. The analyzed cases show that the presence of the future is not normally considered a value in the design of agendas. In the first case of past-centred asymmetric valuations, the temporality from which future actions are planned and agendas are designed reproduces the linearity of thinking from the past towards the future. There is a lack of anticipation strategies because only past experience is reproduced to solve new problems; therefore, they fail in their mission. As Landry says considering urban planning: Yet cities balance on a cusp – decision-makers can repeat past policies in a climate of slow decline, or they can seek to reinvent their city as a vibrant hub of creativity, potential and improving quality of life. Undoubtedly, for the most part, old approaches do not work. We cannot solve 21st-century problems with 19th-century mindsets: the dynamics of cities and the world urban system have changed too dramatically. (Landry, 2012, p. xi) In the second case, future-centred agendas, the groups that manage to plan by overestimating the valorisation of the future, do so by decentring from their past, breaking the inertia of traditions and identities, but at the same time generating cultural contradictions that can cause social ruptures between those who exercise and experience the results of what is planned. Anticipatory agendas, the third case studied, intend to formulate a balance between past knowledge and future imagination, therefore allowing to visualize the imaginaries of the future, making them operative as a decision-making device. In terms of temporalities, they produce a correlation between the presence of the

Design of Development Agendas

113

past (what was prescribed in what was planned up to yesterday) and the presence of the future (what is apprehended today with incidence of tomorrow). A next challenge to perform anticipatory agendas is to compare the way in which global unforeseen events, as the current COVID-19 virus, impact those governments or institutions that promote symmetric or asymmetric agendas regarding time and their cultural decentring. A preliminary hypothesis would be that the pandemic impacts in one way or another in relation to the anticipatory tools that are available. Anticipation becomes tangible when the unforeseeable events (such as COVID-19 pandemic) or the technological changes that this pandemic entails (social dynamics’ dependence on virtuality) can be faced as presence of the future. The STOB model results as an operative tool to interpret the ‘spectrum’ of temporalities that any agenda could manifest, from the extreme past-oriented asymmetry to the extreme future-oriented asymmetry. Its usefulness is to promote an alternative device to design, analyze, and apply policies and agendas, promoting the relevance of incorporating the value of the future to balance the value of the past, and in doing so, producing anticipation. When an agenda manages symmetry between past and future, it becomes anticipatory and it can make the presence of the future have the same value as the presence of the past and then be able to balance becoming, innovation, the avant-garde and creation with experience, heritage, identity, traditions and genealogies. Asymmetric agendas which lean towards the past produce anachronistic actions, create phase shifts in their viability and produce late effects, delays, postponements, which result from a process that should have occurred before or did not occur. Asymmetric agendas which lean towards the future produce actions of cultural divergence: in parallel with opening new technological and communicational horizons and development opportunities, they ignore or alter existing conditions, impacting culture in an aggressive and unequal way. Asymmetric agendas, in short, produce extreme cultural decentring, and can generate poverty, inequality, domination, colonization, terrorism and dictatorships. Symmetrical agendas require anticipatory practices where the value of the future is active and permeates decision-making in a concrete way. In this sense, they produce cultural re-centring that implies sustainability, homeostasis, continuity, coexistence, peace, synergy, collaboration, well-being; in short, those SDGs that we recognize as priorities for social welfare. The value of the future becomes tangible when contrasting the different ways in which temporalities define agendas, either by their minimal impact on the extreme valuation of the past, or by their overestimation as the only value

Cultural Rhythmics

114

to consider, ignoring the value of the past for the construction of cultural identities. Cultural decentring emerges as an instrumental concept for the articulation between culture and time, between identities and valuation of the future, present and past. It allows us to rethink how it is possible that a culture can reconfigure its agendas by modifying its temporality and its concept of culture itself, instead of being thought of as a fixed attribute of a social group that must remain to be characterized, that can be conceived in a dynamic and fluctuating way, as a changing sociocultural and rhythmic process that integrates the presence of the past and the presence of the future.

4.4 POETRY OF DEVELOPMENT Finally, I wish to convey a brief reflection on Anthropology, the study of rhythms and its application. It is not a minor question – as Borges would say – that two of the main pacesetters our field had, Boas and Mauss, have detected and put rhythms on the agenda of relevant topics, convinced that social sciences must see to studying them. When discovering these references, I wondered why there was no School, why this question was not maintained or migrated over to other areas. When analyzing these sources with a new perspective, about 100 years later, it is clear that certain Schools or strands end up skewing their subject of study with the sole purpose of maintaining its outline and its academic shape in regards to other contemporary strands. We see then what Bourdieu mentioned in several of his texts regarding distinction ghettos, and how great theories or formulations disappear in a rhetorical discussion about how to contextualize certain problems, instead of approaching them and providing at least one answer, one idea, risking a solution and not mere conjectures of what it should be. I understand that anthropology today finds itself at crossroads regarding its firmness to make circumstantial decisions regarding the society and culture in which it ‘develops’, and it must be able to intervene in organization and territorial planning processes with conviction. Resuming the approach model anthropologists such as Abram (2014), Appadurai (2015), Archetti (2004), Bryant and Knight (2019), Freidenberg (1991), Greenwood (2000), Garc´ıa Canclini (2008, 2021), and Wright (2020) take, who were faced with the dilemma of consolidating an anthropology with socio-political incidence, it is paramount that we balance our view of practices and the science, with our view of symbols and imaginaries.

Design of Development Agendas

115

An anthropology applied towards comprehending development, both symbolic and materially speaking, is an anthropology of time; an anthropology applied towards intervening and managing territories is also an anthropology of space. Therefore, I consider it appropriate to reassess the guidelines put forth in previous works to widen their reach and possible applications, which are much greater than the intercultural comparative horizon presented in those writings. Investigating the temporality of global development within capitalist society inserts interculturality into homogeneity and, in doing so, shatters appearances. What are we leaving out when calling a society ‘capitalist’? How many diversities and qualities of representation are skewed when we assume a cultural crystallization over the actor’s experiences that dynamize categories? Thus, we can reassess an ancient philosophical dilemma, not only for our Mediterranean ancestors but also for our Oriental uncles and Amerindian grandparents: to what point does language limit our comprehension of the elements that comprise social life, existence and the energy of the cosmos? I, of course, do not attempt to answer these questions here; I merely enunciate them as part of a larger consideration, open for future investigations about time, development, agendas and public policy. There are interpretation gradients in the notions of central concepts we use daily, which generate factual discrepancies, practices, being present-at-hand as Heidegger said, which result in different habitus, referencing Bourdieu. We are told and reminded that there are cultural discontinuities that are not salvageable due to the imposition of one imaginary of ‘human progress’ or ‘global development’, as Levi-Strauss already said in the 1950s. And so, I return to the original question, this work’s origin myth: Why are the social actors of a ‘culturally homogeneous’ group not able to communicate in a systematic and sustained fashion? What in-communicates or dis-communicates them? The supposed homogeneity, attributed to sharing concepts of equal signification, falls apart when we see there are gradients in the interpretations of these concepts, gradients that are only visible when we analyze the concept’s imaginary components. If the analysis remains on the conceptual plain, in the definition that each person gives a word-image, we are not able to ‘see’ the gradients, neither semantic nor syntactic, nor any at all. It is not the same thing for water to be at 0 degrees, 100 degrees or somewhere in between. Any attempt to find the ideal temperature for mate or the water will confirm this. Physicists say there are different phases. It is not the same to walk out onto the street with –15 degrees than with 45 degrees; nevertheless, they all speak of temperature, of ‘heat’ or ‘cold’: ‘The weather is horrible today’, and ‘No, I love days like this’. Language traps us in an atrocious flattening of

116

Cultural Rhythmics

reality if we do not explore its depths, if we do not give the poetry behind categories a voice, that is the multiple meanings that can be evoked by the same object or process. Paraphrasing Bachelard, if we ignore the fact that there is a poetics of space, we turn space into a mere territory, or mere place, or mere productive, touristic or other field. Poetics of space allow us to discern that the nuances of space reside in the spatialities different social actors can construct around physical space. Poetics are possible as long as space is subjectively apprehended and is not limited to meagre, neutral objectivism, with no lyrical possibilities, no hues, no music, no poiesis. We apply our own view to all socio-historic creations, resuming Castoriadis: ‘History is essentially poiesis, and not imitative poetry, but ontological creation and genesis in and by the doing and representing/saying of men. That doing and that representing/saying are instituted, also historically, from a moment, as thinking doing or thinking that is done’ (Castoriadis, 1989, pp. 12–13). Objectified territorial development, without poetics, without territorial nuances, leads to a neutralization of spaces, which for the same reason tend to be segmented into static compartments, such as ‘rural’ and ‘urban’, ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’, ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. A dynamic conception of territory does not conceive such divisions because they partialize the ability to act on it. A socio-territorial dynamic that interprets imaginaries and rhythmics must give a voice to the depth of interpretations of said territory when hearing the ‘poetics’ of its interpreters (social actors). For example, if heritage lacks poetics, it is reduced to a mere thing, a mere object. The poetics of a menhir is the semantic load that imaginaries ‘impregnate’ into the object, the vertical stone stuck into the ground. The poetics of an old tractor that tells us a family’s story is transmitted in the tales told by whoever worked long days and nights on that old piece of welded metal, that shapeless thing with giant wheels we call a tractor. And as I have insisted, poetry (the multiplicity of meanings, polysemy) does not only occur in words, discourse and symbols; it occurs in the relationship between these elements and any experience’s praxis, in an everyday fashion, from the rhythms that make life what it is. Rhythm makes poetry what it is, of course. We learn this when reciting poetry, understanding that its metrics are created when reciting, that its intonation creates the nuances of what we wish to say, that its paraphrases create the range of significations that are possible to conjugate; or when we sing a song or play the guitar, or any musical instrument. Poetry, in the same way as music, is a combination of symbols and rhythms. The very Bachelard, and also Boas and Mauss, made this intrinsic

Design of Development Agendas

117

relationship between poetics and rhythms visible, upon which Durand and later Lefebvre would also weave their theories. I am now able to close the hermeneutic circle and concert an epistemic circularity between the theory and the pragmatic uses. Beginning with Bachelard, Durand and imaginaries, I return to the thoughts on the relevance of taking on a poetics of space and time, which looks to rethink the imaginary roots of ‘global development’ and innovate in new interpretations and methods, incorporating the series of social life nuances that have allowed me to pay attention to the fate of imaginaries and cultural rhythmics of the actors involved.

REFERENCES Abram, S. (2014). The time it takes: Temporalities of planning. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20, 129–147. Adam, B. (1998). Timescapes of modernity. The environment and invisible hazards. London: Routledge. Adam, B. (2022). Thirty years of time & society: The challenges for time studies revisited. Time & Society, 31(1), 6–9. Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2017). Time and the rhythms of emancipatory education. London: Routledge. Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2021). Time and the rhythms of academia: A rhythmanalytical perspective. In F. Vostal (Ed.), Inquiring into academic timescapes (pp. 21–38). Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Anderson, B. (1993). Comunidades imaginadas: Reflexiones sobre el origen y ´ del nacionalismo. M´exico: Fondo de Cultura Economica. ´ la difusion Appadurai, A. (2015). El future como hecho cultural. Ensayos sobre la ´ global. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica. ´ condicion Appadurai, A. (2017). Hacer negocios con palabras: el fracas del lenguaje como clave para entender el capitalism financiero. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. ´ Archetti, E. (2004). Una perspectiva antropologica sobre cambio cultural y desarrollo: el caso del cuy en la sierra ecuatoriana. En M. Boivin, A. Rosato, & ´ V. Arribas (Eds.), Constructores de otredad (pags. 222–233). Buenos Aires: Antropofagia. Bachelard, G. (1957/2011). Po´etica del espacio. M´exico: Fondo de Cultura ´ Economica. ´ Baczko, B. (2005). Los imaginarios sociales. Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision.

119

120

References

Barcelona Time Use Initiative. (2022). Barcelona declaration on time policies. Retrieved from https://www.timeuse.barcelona/barcelona-declaration-ontime-policies Baudrillard, J., & Nouvel, J. (2003). Los objetos singulares. Arquitectura y ´ filosof´ıa. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Bauman, Z. (2011). Tiempos liquidos. Vivir en una e´ poca de incertidumbre. Buenos Aires: Tusquests Editores. ´ en el pensamiento Benedetti, A. (2009). Los usos de la categor´ıa region ´ geografico argentino. Scripta Nova, 13, 281–309. ´ y simultaneidad. A proposito ´ Bergson, H. (2004). Duracion de la teor´ıa de Einstein. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo. ´ Bertoncello, R. (2002). Turismo y territorio. Otras practicas, otras miradas. Aportes y Transferencias, 6(2), 29–50. Bertoncello, R. (2006). Turismo, territorio y sociedad. El mapa tur´ıstico de la Argentina. In A. Geraiges de Lemos, M. Arroyo, & M. L. Silveira (Eds.), America Latina: cidade, campo e turismo. Buenos Aires: CLACSO-USP. Blue, S. (2017). Institutional rhythms: Combining practice theory and rhythmanalysis to conceptualise processes of institutionalisation. Time & Society, 28(3), 922–950. Boas, F. (1925). Stylistic aspects of primitive literature. Journal of American Folklore, 38(149), 329–339. Boas, F. (1964). Cuestiones fundamentales de antropolog´ıa cultural. Buenos Aires: Solar; Hachette. Boas, F. (1927/2010). Primitive art. Toronto, ON: Courier Dover Publications. Bohm, D. (1998). La totalidad y el orden implicado. Buenos Aires: Kairos. ´ Buenos Aires: Emece. Borges, J. L. (1996). Discusion. ´ Bourdieu, P. (2006). Argelina 60. Estructuras economicas y estructuras temporales. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. ´ Bourdieu, P. (2007). El sentido practico. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Bourdieu, P. (2008). Los usos sociales de la ciencia. Buenos Aires: Nueva ´ Vision. Bourdieu, P. (2014). Capital cultural, escuela y espacio social. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.

References

121

Bourqia, R., & Sili, M. (2021). New paths of development. Perspectives from the global south. Berlin: Springer. Bouysse-Cassagne, T., Harris, O., Platt, T., & Cereceda, V. (1987). Tres Reflexiones sobre el Pensamiento Andino. LA Paz: Hisbol. Bryant, R., & Knight, D. (2019). The anthropology of the future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ´ Canevacci, M. (2013). Sincr´etika. Exploracoes etnograficas sobre artes ´ contemporaneas. Sao Paulo: Studio Nobel. Carbonell, E. (2004). Debates acerca de la antropolog´ıa del tiempo. Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona. ´ imaginaria de la sociedad. Buenos Aires: Castoriadis, C. (1989). La institucion Tusquets. Clifford, J. (1999). Itinerarios culturales. Barcelona: Gedisa. Dakka, F. (2021). Rhythm and the possible: Moments, anticipation and dwelling in the contemporary university. In F. Vostal (Ed.), Inquiring into academic timescapes (pp. 39–58). Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Day, S., Papataxiarchis, E., & Stewart, M. (1999). Lilies of the field: Marginal people who live for the moment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Valencia: Pre-Textos. Derrida, J. (2005). De la gramatolog´ıa. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Descola, P. (1996). La Selva Culta: simbolismo y praxis en la ecolog´ıa de los Achuar. Quito: Editorial Abya Yala. ´ Descola, P., & Palsson, G. (2011). Naturaleza y sociedad. Perspectivas ´ antropologicas. M´exico: Siglo XXI Editores. ´ de Di Filippo, M. S. (2008). Los indicadores sociales en la formulacion proyectos de desarrollo con enfoque territorial: documento de trabajo No. 2. Buenos Aires: INTA. ´ Dilthey, W. (1944). El mundo historico. M´exico: Fondo de Cultura ´ Economica. Española, R. A. (2001). Diccionario de la Lengua Española (DRAE). Madrid: Espasa. ´ simbolica. ´ Durand, G. (2000). La imaginacion Buenos Aires: Amorrurtu.

122

References

´ Durand, G. (2004). Las estructuras antropologicas del imaginario. M´exico: ´ Fondo de Cultura Economica. Durkheim, E. (1982). Las Formas Elementales de la Vida Religiosa. Madrid: Akal. Escobar, A. (2012). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. (1977). Los Nuer. Barcelona: Anagrama. Eversole, R. (2018). Anthropology for development: From theory to practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Fabian, J. (2002). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Fang, Y. (2017). Temporality and Shenzhen urbanism in the era of "China Dreams". Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 3(1), 189–212. Franklin, B. (1882). Advice to a young tradesman. In B. Franklin (Ed.), Works. Chicago, IL: Sparks. Fraser, J. T. (1987). Time, the familiar stranger. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Freidenberg, J. (1991). Participatory research and grassroots development: A case study from Harlem. City and Society, 5(1), 64–75. Fuller, T. (2019). Anticipation and the normative stance. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of anticipation. Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making (pp. 93–108). Cham: Springer. ´ Garc´ıa Azcarate, J., & Ribotta, E. (2007). La gente y el patrimonio en el valle ´ En: P. Arenas, B. Manasse, y E. Noli de Tafi: aportes para su uso y valoracion. (comp.). Paisajes y Procesos Sociales en Taf´ı del Valle. Imprenta de la ´ Universidad Nacional de Tucuman. ´ imaginada. Buenos Aires: Paidos. ´ Garc´ıa Canclini, N. (2008). La globalizacion Garc´ıa Canclini, N. (2021). La institucionalidad de la cultura y los cambios ´ No 1. IEA-Universidad de Sao socioculturales. Cuadernos de investigacion Paulo. Gardner, K., & Lewis, D. (2015). Anthropology and development: Challenges for the twenty-first century. London: Pluto Press. ´ de las culturas. Barcelona: Gedisa. Geertz, C. (2003). La interpretacion

References

123

Gell, A. (1992). The anthropology of time: Cultural constructions of temporal maps and images. Oxford: Berg. Glennie, P., & Thrift, N. (1996). Reworking E P Thompson’s time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Time & Society, 5(3), 275–299. Golombek, D. A., & Rosenstein, R. E. (2010). Physiology of circadian entrainment. Physiological Reviews, 90(3), 1063–1102. ´ ´ Gonzalez-Ruibal, A. (2007). Arqueolog´ıa sim´etrica: Un giro teorico sin ´ paradigmatica. ´ revolucion Complutum, 18, 283–319. Goodman, S. (2010). Sonic warfare: Sound, affect and the ecology of fear. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. ´ a la investigacion-acci ´ ´ Greenwood, D. J. (2000). De la observacion on ´ cr´ıtica de las practicas ´ ´ participativa: una vision antropologicas. Revista de Antropolog´ıa Social, 9, 27–49. Greenwood, D. J., & Levin, M. (2006). Introduction to action research: Social research for social change. London: Sage. ¨ Gunel, G. (2019). Spaceship in the desert: Energy, climate change, and urban design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ´ Gunn, A. (1986). El problema del tiempo I. Estudio historico y cr´ıtico. Buenos Aires: Hyspam´erica. ´ del “fin de los Haesbaert, R. (2011). El mito de la desterritorializacion: territorios” a la multiterritorialidad. M´exico: Siglo XXI Editores. Hall, E. (1959). The silent language. New York, NY: Doubleday & Company. Hall, E. (1983). The dance of life. The other dimension of time. New York, NY: Anchor Books. ´ oculta. Barcelona: Siglo XXI Editores. Hall, E. (1966/1999). La dimension Hallowell, I. (1955). Temporal orientations in western civilization and in a pre-literate society. American Anthropologist, 39, 647–670. Hawking, S., & Penrose, R. (1996). La naturaleza del espacio y el tiempo. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria. ´ Heidegger, M. (1997). Ser y tiempo. M´exico: Fondo de Cultura Economica. ´ D. (2002a). ¿Como ´ Hiernaux-Nicolas, definir el turismo? Un repaso disciplinario. Aportes y Transferencias, 6(2), 11–27.

124

References

´ D. (2002b). Turismo e imaginarios. In D. HiernauxHiernaux-Nicolas, ´ A. Cordero, & L. Van Duynen Montijo (Eds.), Imaginarios sociales y Nicolas, turismo sostenible. Costa Rica: FLACSO. Hodder, I. (2008). Multivocality and social archaeology. In J. Habu, C. Fawcett, & J. Matsunaga (Eds.), Evaluating multiple narratives beyond nationalist, colonialist, imperialist archaeologies. New York, NY: Springer. Hodges, M. (2008). Reconsidering time’s arrow: Bergson, Deleuze and the anthropology of time. Anthropological Theory, 8(4), 399–429. Hodges, M. (2010). The time of the interval: Historicity, modernity, and epoch in Rural France. American Ethnologist, 37(1), 115–131. Hoffman, D. M. (1999). Culture and comparative education: Toward decentering and recentering the discourse. Comparative Education Review, 43(4), 464–488. Holland, D., Fox, G., & Daro, V. (2008). Social movements and collective identity: A decentered, dialogic view. Anthropological Quarterly, 81, 95–126. ´ del Tiempo en la Hubert, H. (1990). Estudio Sumario sobre la Representacion ´ y la Magia. Reisgids, 51, 177–204. Religion Husserl, E. (1959). Fenomenolog´ıa de la conciencia del tiempo inmanente. Buenos Aires: Nova. INTA. (2007). Enfoque de desarrollo territorial: documento de trabajo No 1. Buenos Aires: INTA. INTA. (2008). Plan nacional de Apoyo al Desarrollo Terrritorial. Buenos Aires: INTA. Iparraguirre, G. (2011). Antropolog´ıa del Tiempo. El caso mocov´ı. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropolog´ıa. Iparraguirre, G. (2016). Time, temporality and cultural rhythmics: An anthropological case study. Time & Society, 25(3), 613–633. ´ pol´ıtica y Iparraguirre, G. (2017). Imaginarios del desarrollo. Gestion cient´ıfica de la cultura. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Iparraguirre, G. (2019). Anticipation as presence of the future. Handbook of anticipation. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of anticipation (pp. 407–424). Cham: Springer.

References

125

Iparraguirre, G. (2021). Cultural rhythmics inside academic temporalities. Urgency, development and temporality. In F. Vostal (Ed.), Inquiring into academic timescapes (pp. 59–72). Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Iparraguirre, G. (2022). Policies for time studies: A call for a global political-scientific agenda. Time & Society, 31(1), 34–37. Iparraguirre, G., & Ardenghi, S. (2011). Tiempo y Temporalidad desde la Antropolog´ıa y la F´ısica. Revista de Antropolog´ıa Experimental, 11, 251–260. Isla, A. (2014). Certezas e incertibumbres en el espacio de la Antropolog´ıa Aplicada. Revista de Antropolog´ıa Social, 23, 91–116. Isla, A., & Colmegna, P. (2005). Pol´ıtica y poder en los procesos de desarrollo: ´ de la antropolog´ıa. Buenos Aires: De debate y posturas en torno a la aplicacion las Ciencias. ´ pura. M´exico: Porrua. ´ Kant, I. (1996). Cr´ıtica de la Razon Knight, D. (2021). Vertiginous life. An anthropology of time and the unforeseen. New York, NY: Berghahn. Kristensen, M. J., & Frangi, J. L. (1995). La Sierra de la Ventana: una isla de biodiversidad. Ciencia Hoy, 5(30), 25–34. ´ conceptual y problemas ¨ Kruger, H. (2013). Sustentabilidad. Interpretacion observados en el Centro y Sur de la provincia de Buenos Aires. Bordenave: INTA. Kruse, F. (2007). Vital rhythm and temporal form in langer and dewey. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 21(1), 16–26. Landry, C. (2012). The creative city: A toolkit for urban innovators. London: Earthscan. Latour, B. (2007). Nunca fuimos modernos. Ensayo de antropolog´ıa sim´etrica. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Latour, B. (2012). Cogitamus: seis cartas sobre las humanidades cient´ıficas. ´ Buenos Aires: Paidos. ´ Simbolica ´ Leach, E. (1971). Dos Ensayos sobre la Representacion del Tiempo. In E. Leach (Ed.), Replanteamiento de la antropolog´ıa (pp. 192–210). Barcelona: Seix Barral. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. London: Continuum.

126

References

L´evi-Strauss, C. (1979). Antropolog´ıa estructural. Buenos Aires: Fondo de ´ Cultura Economica. L´evi-Strauss, C. (1993). El pensamiento Salvaje. M´exico: Fondo de Cultura ´ Economica. Levy Yeyati, E. (2017). 100 pol´ıticas para la Argentina del 2030. Buenos Aires: Ciudad de Lectores. ´ Ley 25.743. (2006). ‘Ley Nacional de patrimonio arqueologico y ´ paleontologico’, Argentina. Lizcano, E. (2009). M´etaforas que nos piensan. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Loewy, T. (2008). Indicadores sociales de las unidades productivas para el desarrollo rural en Argentina. Revista Iberoamericana de Evaluacin Educativa, 9, 75–85. Malinowski, B. (1973). Los Argonautas del Pacifico Occidental. Barcelona: Peninsula. ´ L., Carolina, P., & Paula, R. M. (2013). Mastrangelo, A., D´ıaz Galan, ´ desde la praxis. The Public, XIV, Antropolog´ıas aplicadas varias: una revision 47–70. ´ ´ para el desarrollo en Mattar, J., & Cuervo, L. M. (2017). Planificacion Am´erica Latina y el Caribe. Enfoque, experiencias y perspectivas. Santiago: CEPAL. Mauss, M. (1979). Ensayo sobre las variaciones estacionales en las sociedades esquimales. Un estudio de morfolog´ıa social. In Sociolog´ıa y antropolog´ıa. Madrid: Editorial Tecnos. Mauss, M. (2002). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge. Mauss, M. (2007). The manual of ethnography. New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books. May, J., & Thrift, N. (2001). Timespace. Geographies of temporality. London: Routledge. ´ Medina Vasquez, J. E., Becerra, S., & Castaño, P. (2014). Prospectiva y ´ pol´ıtica publica para el cambio estructural en Am´erica Latina y el Caribe. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. Mendez Casariego, H., & Pascale Medina, C. (2014). Ordenamiento ´ Territorial en el Municipio: una gu´ıa metodologica. Santiago: INTA.

References

127

Miller, R. (2015). Learning, the future, and complexity. An essay on the emergence of futures literacy. European Journal of Education, 50(4), 513–523. Miller, R., Poli, R., & Rossel, P. (2018). The discipline of anticipation: Foundations for futures literacy. In R. Miller (Ed.), Transforming the future (open access) (pp. 75–89). London: Routledge. ´ (2016). Argentina enseña y aprende. Plan estrat´egico Ministerio de Educacion. ´ Republica ´ nacional 2016–2021. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Educacion. Argentina. Minkowski, H. (1923). Space and time. In W. Perrett & G. B. Jeffrey (Eds.), The principle of relativity. A collection of original memoirs on the special and general theory of relativity (pp. 75–91). New York, NY: Dover. Munn, N. (1992). The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 93–123. Naciones Unidas. (2013). Prospectiva y desarrollo. El clima de la igualdad en Am´erica Latina y el Caribe a 2020. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. Naciones Unidas. (2018a). Agenda 2030 y los objetivos de desarrollo dostenible. Una oportunidad para Am´erica Latina y el Caribe. Santiago: CEPAL. ´ ´ para la Naciones Unidas. (2018b). Gu´ıa metodologica: planificacion ´ implementacion de la Agenda 2030 en Am´erica Latina y el Caribe. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. ´ Newton, I. (2004). Principios matematicos de la Filosof´ıa Natural. Madrid: Alianza. Ordenanza No 137/21. (2021). Agenda tornquist 2030. Tornquist Municipio. Ordenanza No 1.461/02. (2002). Plan de Ordenamiento territorial de la Comarca de la Sierra de la Ventana–Partido de Tornquist. Tornquist Municipio. Poli, R. (2011). Steps toward an explicit ontology of the future. Journal of Futures Studies, 16(1), 67–78. Poli, R. (2019). Handbook of anticipation. Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making. Cham: Springer. Prats, L. (2004). Antropolog´ıa y patrimonio. Barcelona: Ariel.

128

References

´ del patrimonio local. Cuadernos de Prats, L. (2005). Concepto y gestion Antropolog´ıa Social, 21, 17–35. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1998). Entre el tiempo y la eternidad. Buenos Aires: Alianza Universidad. ´ Reynoso, C. (2008). Corrientes teoricas en antropolog´ıa. Perspectivas desde el siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB. Ricoeur, P. (2012). Ideolog´ıa y utop´ıa. Barcelona: Gedisa. Rigby, P. (1985). Persistent pastoralists. Nomadic Societies in Transition. London: Zed Books. Sahlins, M. (2017). The original political society. In D. Graeber & M. Sahlins (Eds.), On kings (pp. 23–64). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ´ de la naturaleza en la Santamarina Campos, B. (2012). Patrimonializacion comunidad valenciana. Espacios, iron´ıas y contradicciones. In O. Beltran, J. J. ´ de la naturaleza. El marco Pascual, & I. Vaccaro (Eds.), Patrimonializacion ´ Ankulegi Antropologia social de las pol´ıticas ambientales. San Sebastian: Elkartea. Santana Talavera, A. (2002). ‘Mirar y leer: autenticidad y patrimonio cultural para el consumo tur´ıstico’, Actas del VI Encontro Nacional de Turismo com Base Local, Campo Grande. ¨ Schrodinger, E. (1997). ¿Qu´e es la vida? Barcelona: Tusquets Editores. ´ ´ Sheldrake, R. (2006). La presencia del pasado. Resonancia morfica y habitos ´ de la naturaleza. Barcelona: Kairos. ´ de la planificacion ´ Sili, M. E. (2019). El lento proceso de construccion ´ territorial en Paraguay. In M. E. Sili (Ed.), Modelos y practicas de gobernanza ´ internacional. Lecce: Universita del Salento. territorial, una comparacion Stephenson, M. L., & Ali-Knight, J. (2010). Dubai’s tourism industry and its societal impact: Social implications and sustainable challenges. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 8(4), 278–292. Terradas, I. (1998). Circa: Antropolog´ıa del tiempo y la Inexactitud. Anales de ´ Joaqu´ın Costa, 14, 137–152. la Fundacion Tomasi, J. (2010). Geograf´ıas del pastoreo. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires. Torres, F. (2021). Temporal regimes: Materiality, politics, technology. London: Routledge.

References

129

Turner, T. (1993). Anthropology and multiculturalism: What is anthropology that multiculturalists should be mindful of it? Cultural Anthropology, 8(4), 411–429. Turner, V. (2005). La selva de los s´ımbolos: aspectos del ritual ndembu. Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores. Urry, J. (2004). La mirada del turista. Lima: Universidad de San Mart´ın de Porres. Vostal, F. (Ed.). (2021). Inquiring into academic timescapes. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Walker, G. (2021). Energy and rhythm. Rhythmanalysis for a low carbon future. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Weber, M. (2003). La e´ tica protestante y el esp´ıritu del capitalismo. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. ´ del espacio, la palabra y el cuerpo en el Chaco Wright, P. (2003). Colonizacion ´ argentino. Horizontes Antropologicos, 19, 137–152. ´ espacial de la Wright, P. (2005). Cuerpos y espacio plurales: Sobre la razon ´ ´ practica etnografica. Indiana Berl´ın, 22, 55–74. ´ Wright, P. (2008). Ser-en-el-sueño. Cronicas de historia y vida toba. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Wright, P. G. (2020). Cuerpos viales, cultura y ciudadan´ıa: Reflexiones ´ antropologicas. Encartes, 3(5), 10–28. Wunenburger, J.-J. (2008). Antropolog´ıa del imaginario. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Del Sol. Yang, F. (2017). Temporality and Shenzhen urbanism in the era of “China dreams”. Studies in Global Asias, 3(1), 189–212. Zaidan, E. (2016). The impact of cultural distance on local residents perception of tourism development: The case of Dubai in UAE. Turizam: ˇ MeCunarodni Znanstveno-Struˇcni Casopis, 64(1), 109–126. Zalba, S., & Villamil, C. (2002). Invasion of woody plants in relictual native grasslands. Biological Invasions, 4(1–2), 55–72. Zerubavel, E. (1985). Hidden rhyhtms. Schedules and calendars in social life. London: University of California Press. Zonabend, F. (1984). The enduring memory: Time and history in a French village. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

INDEX Action plans, 45 Agricultural production imaginaries, 39–40 Agriculture, 66–83 analysis matrix of social imaginaries, 69 imaginaries of agricultural production, 68–72 imagined technology, 76–78 rhythmics of rurality and industrialisation, 72–76 rhythmics of sustainability, 78–83 Agriculturisation, 81 Anthropology, 114 of space, 11 of time, 9–10 Anticipation, 85 rhythmics of, 87–89 Anticipation, 111 Anticipatory agendas, 105–111 Appearance, 6 Arrhythmia, 63–64 Articulation, 55–56 Asymmetric agendas, 113

Componential analysis, 31 Constellation, 30 Cultural actions, 20–21 Cultural artifacts, 33 Cultural decentring, 94, 104 Cultural discontinuities, 115 Cultural discourses, 20–21 Cultural heritage, 39–40, 51 analysis matrix of social imaginaries about, 42 heritage intervention model, 47, 50–51 imaginaries, 41–44 scientific-political management of heritage, 44–47 Cultural ideas, 20–21 Cultural ideologies, 20–21 Cultural imagination, 19 Cultural policy, 47 Cultural practices, 20–21 Cultural prejudices, 20–21 Cultural resources, 55 Cultural rhythmics, 1–3, 22, 29 composition, 27 Cultural rhythms, 64–65

Beautiful landscape, 44

Daily life rhythms, 28 Dead metaphors, 19–20 Decision-making processes, 97 Development, 2 as global temporality, 33–37 Development agendas, 97 anticipatory agendas, 105–111 design, temporality and culture, 97–111

Calendar rhythmics, 28 Category, 30 Celestial rhythms, 64–65 Chronemics studies, 14–15 Chronology, 24–25 ‘City Studio’ programme, 107 Collective unconscious, 19 Communicative life rhythms, 28 Component, 30

131

Index

132

future-centred asymmetry, 102–105 past-centred asymmetry, 99–102 poetry of development, 114–117 STOB model, 94, 96–97 value of future for public policy, 111–114 Economic life rhythms, 28–29 ‘Ernesto Tornquist’ Provincial Park (PPET), 40 Ethnographic approach, 31–32 Ethnography, 46 Evolution, 36 Experimental Agronomic Station (EEA), 67–68 Free time, 60–61 Future-centred asymmetry, 102–105 Generic temporality, 7–9 Greenwood’s approach, 46 Hegemonic spatiality, 14–17 Hegemonic temporality, 7, 10, 34–35 Heritage imaginary, 44 Heritage intervention model, 47, 50–51 Historical moment, 7–9 Imaginaries, 19–20 of agricultural production, 68–72 of future, 84–87 of rural tourism, 53–58 Imagination forces, 21 Imagined technology, 76–78 ‘INCLUDE’ programme, 107 Industrialisation, rhythmics of, 72–76 Landscape, 44 Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, 25–26 Leisure, rhythmics of, 60–66 Light–dark rhythm, 64–65 Linear time, 9

Living metaphors, 19–20 Matrices of imaginaries and rhythmics, 30–33 Mere appearance, 6 Metaphors, 19–20 Modernisation, 77 Modernity, 76 National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), 52, 67 Natural resources, 55 Natural rhythms, 64–65 Non-hegemonic temporality, 10 Originary spatiality, 14–17 Originary temporality, 7–10 Past-centred asymmetry, 99–102 Patrimonial imaginaries, 44 Patrimonial knowledge, 43–44 Perception, 20 Phenomenon, 6 Physical manifestation of becoming, 12 Picturesque landscape, 44 Poetry of development, 114–117 Political cultural rhythmics, 29 Political life rhythms, 29 Politics, 83–91 imaginaries of future, 84–87 presence of future and governance, 89–91 rhythmics of anticipation, 87–89 Productivism, 78 Progress, 32 Proxemics studies, 14–15 Public policy, value of future for, 111–114 Pulse, 22 Regional tourism brand, 101 Relativity theory, 36–37 Renewable energies, 110 Rhythm, 22–24 of collective activities, 24 layers, 24–25

Index

of music and dancing, 25 Rhythmic issues, 25 Rhythmical otherness, 10 Rhythmics, 22, 25 agriculture, 66–83 of anticipation, 87–89 cultural heritage, 40–51 of development in Argentina, 39 of leisure, 60–66 of lunar cycle, 28 politics, 83–91 of rurality and industrialisation, 72–76 of sustainability, 78–83 tourism, 51–66 of touristic management, 58–60 Rural tourism, 39 analysis matrix of social imaginaries, 54 imaginaries, 53–58 Rurality, rhythmics of, 72–76 Scientific fields, 45 Scientific imaginaries, 39 Scientific-political management of heritage, 44–47 SDGs, 105 Seasonal cultural rhythmics, 28 Seasonal life rhythms, 28 Seasonal natural rhythmics, 28 Semantic domains, 31 Semblance, 6 Social imaginaries, 3, 19, 22, 30, 56–57 Social imagination, 19 Social morphology of Inuit, 23–24 Social organization rhythmics, 26 Social rhythms, 2 Social theory of space, 11 Sociological methods, 31–32 Space, 10, 13, 28–29 Spatiality, 10, 13–15

133

Statistical semantics, 17 Sustainability, 70 components, 55 rhythmics of, 78–83 Sustenance, 28–29 Sustenance rhythmics, 26 Symbolic fields, 45 Symmetric Tension of Becoming model (STOB model), 94, 97, 113 characterization for designing agendas, 98 symmetrical past-future flow of time, 96 Technology of inputs, 77 Technology of processes, 77 Tempo, 22 Temporality, 5–7 Territorial development, 93 Territorial imaginaries, 39 Time, 5, 7, 34–35 Tornquist 2020 Strategic Plan, 100 Tourism, 51–66 imaginaries of rural tourism, 53–58 imaginary, 56 rhythmics, 28 rhythmics of leisure, 60–66 rhythmics of touristic management, 58–60 Tourist map, 55 Touristic management, rhythmics of, 58–60 Traditionalism, 78 Travelling, 64 Vital rhythm, 25 Western temporality, 9 Worldview rhythmics, 26 Zombies, 19–20