I'll be presenting at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in Montreal, as part of a panel entitled "Managers Of Things, Or What Do Managers Imagine Themselves To Be Managing?" on Friday, November 18, from 8-9:45am.

Managing Expectations: Spectacles of Corruption, Rituals of Patronage

Because of its symbolic and economic weight within Paraguay, Itaipú hydroelectric dam--the world's largest--has come to embody what its planners hoped: the physical manifestation of an all powerful state. With the recent presidential election of leftist former Bishop Fernando Lugo, a new group of technocrats and politicians appointed to the helm did not merely manage the energy potential of the dam, but through it distilled the "promise" of the Paraguayan nation--promise in the sense of commitment and of hope for the future. As the engine of the Paraguayan state apparatus, the dam stood at the nexus of an intricate patronage system that grew concomitantly with the energy production. How and what favors were asked and answered by technocrats appointed to manage electricity production--a public secret--unmasks more than just the balancing act performed by high level employees as they juggled partisan obligations, political aspirations, and social pressure to portray generosity as a hallmark of power. Rather, this gets to the heart of how the fractured and tentative "state" is constituted in Paraguay--protecting privilege through the management of resources and relationships. Campaign promises to end patronage and administer the dam's wealth to bring development clashed with entrenched models of state-to-nation obligations and the personal ambitions of a new class of political elites. This paper explores how the top managers at the dam straddled informal expectations of patronage with formal responsibilities of energy production in the midst of a push towards "transparency" thwarted and abetted by mediatic "corruption" scandals. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork among Paraguay's political elite, this paper analyzes rituals of approach and request, how Itaipú managers configured multiple vectors of obligation, and how a hydroelectric dam embodied fantasies of prosperity. Itaipú's managers explicitly described this process as a way not just to remake the dam, but as a way to remake the Paraguayan state itself.

Dr. Richard Alan White, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington D.C. and noted historian of Paraguay found himself in a curious, frustrating dilemma when he gave copies of very important archival documents back to Paraguay last spring. To resolve it, rather than just up the ante, he went all in.

When White was doing his dissertation research on Paraguay, he came across a valuable collection of documents housed at the University of California--the Bareiro Collection. Someone has transcribed the entire collection and pdf-ed them. In celebration of Paraguay's bicentennial earlier this year, he gave the National Archive in Asunción copies of all 5000 documents as part of an attempt to increase the Archive's resources. Almost immediately, people got ahold of the documents and bound them and sold them for up to $170. (This is more than the average monthly salary in Paraguay.)

To circumvent this, White has uploaded the entire collection to a mediafire site. This can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world, and reflects a commitment to putting history in the grasp of ordinary Paraguayans.

I've only begun to look through the Bareiro Collection and have already found several documents that are germane to my not-not-not-my dissertation topic (the Robertson brothers' years in Paraguay, their business dealings, their banishment by Gaspar de Francia, and their writings on the whole experience decades later). The transcriptions of hand-written entries in official record books preserves archaic [mis]spellings ("Yndios" instead of "Indios,""Gefe" instead of "Jefe") and orthographic curiosities (like the practice of writing abbreviations in a vertical manner) and even the 1814 order by which the governing body endowed "the Citizen José Gaspar de Francia with the title Supreme Dictator of the Republic...for five years" (a title which he held onto until his death in 1840).

I have the privilege of being on a fascinating panel entitled: "Truth, Authorship and Credibility in Travellers' Narratives" at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Friday, April 15, 2011 in Seattle at 10am.

I've called my paper:
Journeys of Empire: the Robertson brothers' Letters on Paraguay


If you just happen to be in town, please do stop by. Here's the abstract:

This paper traces the two voyages of the Robertson brothers: their early 19th century foray into Paraguay and the journey of their Letters on Paraguay, published two decades later. It does more than just render an eyewitness account by the first British visitors to the republic; it allows us to explore how knowledge of the periphery is received at the center of empire. I demonstrate how Letters, and the evocatively named third volume, Francia's Reign of Terror, shaped how Paraguay was perceived in the English-speaking world.

John arrived in 1806 as revolution engulfed the Iberian colonies and was later joined by William, making, losing, and regaining their fortune through trade. The Letters recounting these experiences read as more than ethnography—they describe the wealth of Paraguay and the rise of its first ruler, Gaspar de Francia. The Letters framed Paraguay as a tropical dictatorship in need of liberation and as a fabled land of plenty awaiting investment, leading to justifications for the (British-funded) War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870) and the ensuing sell-off of Paraguayan property. This paper is based on a close reading of the Letters, English-language newspapers and trade journals, and other contemporary secondary literature against a backdrop of archival and ethnographic work in Paraguay. The Letters and their reception speak to questions of how depictions of tyranny, imaginaries of exotic riches, and geographical knowledge intersect.

For more on John and William Parish Robertson, check out their books on google books: here and here and here.

Please join us as seven authors from the Library's Research Study Rooms
present in the South Court Auditorium a wide-ranging series of
free public lunch-time (1:15 pm) lectures on

History

Stakes of a Triple Frontier City: the Untold History of Ciudad del Este

Friday, January 21, 2011

Ciudad del Este is the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of. Paraguay’s second largest city is the subject of action movies, spy dramas, and airport mystery novels. In the heart of Latin America, the story goes, sits a triad of border cities where shoppers weave between rickety stands to enter gleaming shopping galleries owned by Taiwanese or Arab merchants. A panoply of organized crime supposedly takes advantage of low tariffs and even lower customs enforcement to smuggle billions in contraband to neighboring Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil or Puerto Iguazu, Argentina (and then beyond). Rather than this spectacular and yet shallow depiction of the city, come hear a different account of Ciudad del Este. Instead, we will look at the founding of the city in 1957 and its trajectory over the next three decades to see how a city planned to be the emblem of a modern Paraguay has developed into what it is today, the hopes and disillusionments of globalization.

Christine Folch is completing a dissertation in the Anthropology Department of the CUNY Graduate Center on the national and international politics of hydroelectricity, based on years of fieldwork in Paraguay.