The Subject-ivity of Photographs: Contouring the Retina and the Indígena

• In Event: Curriculum Studies and Historicizing the Present: The Political and the Impracticality of Practical Knowledge

Abstract

This paper is an archival viewing of portraits that gave contours to the retina in the making of lo indígena as a (s)object at the turn of the 20th century in Guatemala. The purpose of the paper is to delve into the visual archive of selected photographs as a springboard to understand how the indigenous (s)object has been visually constituted. This as an analytical and political gesture aimed at teasing out the making of educational aspirations whose heritages are rewritten in an ecology of Guatemalan ‘modern’ education.


Engaging with visual histories of educational configurations is not a luxury but a necessity considering that, as W. J. T. Mitchell (1995) would argue, “we live in a culture of images, a society of the spectacle,” (p. 5) where such images are and have been “a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourses, bodies, and frugality” (p.16). In such a culture of images, Nicholas Mirzoeff (2005) states, we are and have been visual subjects, “agents of sight (regardless of our capacity to see) and as the objects of certain discourses of visuality” educated in particular regimes of appearance, as Inés Dussel (2008) would warn us, and instructed by ways in which one should look. The paper is also informed by Ian Hacking’s (1998, 2001, 2004) making-up people and the problematic making of such people in Jacques Derrida’s (1993) analytics.

Archival methods inform the modes of inquiry. The portraits and photographs selected are statements. These statements relate to what Gilles Deleuze (1969) would call “moments of intensity” in the subject-ification of what is indigenous or when it becomes more noticeable. A statement is, as Michel Foucault (1972) would describe it, a “function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities and which reveals them with concrete contents in time and space” (p. 87). The concrete contents in the photographs inform ‘practical’ questions on the failures of education meant to serve indigenous peoples. The data sources are photographs and supporting documents such as policies, curriculum, speeches, and journals.

Some of the results point to the making of educational aspirations which are written with the visual vocabularies of an innocent look, dirty and barefooted rural ‘indian’ in need. Her problem is living rural and at an anthropological distance from the ‘non-indian.’ The Victorian and roman Catholic imagery form discursive elements of integration, transition, enlightenment, and modernizing. The globe, the alphabetical text, books, and literacy dialogue with the desirable ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ citizen that the ‘indian’ is not. How can the indigenous (s)object made-up under these conditions disturb the unsustainable intercultural discourse and performance?

The visual regime that operates in ordering and sorting indigenous (s)objects offers every possibility for maintaining the current state of affairs for indigenous peoples in educational spaces. What is at stake is dismantling the arrangements of objects that reproduce late 19th and early 20th century discourses of visuality and educational aspirations. That is the scholarly significance of this study.

Author

• Ligia L. Lopez, University of Wisconsin - Madison