RafaelFajardo

The recursive movements of afterthought are themselves, I believe, the result of what Walter Benjamin claims is the collector’s deepest desire – to renew the old world – a desire that can be achieved by taking something from one context and adding it to another, such as the story of the devil in the cane fields of western Columbia, added by me to what i take to be capitalist commonsense in advanced economies where assumptions about the market suddenly seem strange when held up to the mirror of supernatural ideas involving the Prince of Darkness.
However, it is not only that the old world – my world before i got to the cane fields of western Colombia – has become renewed but that it has become seen by me and therefore, I hope, by my readers in a fundamentally new and enthralling way. That of course can amount to a renewal because this new way of seeing is the beginning of a new way of understanding ones understanding. This strikes me as something more powerful than a new or different idea. It communicates from “the other side.” It is a gift to the “old world,” medicine for rethinking reality, more than an idea because it tears away at the edifice of thought and assumptions that allowed me to navigate my world until then. It has this wonderfully enlivening destructive quality. It is not – most definitely not – accumulation or part of one of those endearing upward “learning curves” I first heard about in the U.S.A. Nor is it part of “learning from one’s mistakes.” Rather it is to begin the labour of cosmogenesis all over again from a different starting point.
The quality of new thought differs in other ways as well. It is highly physical, and theatrical. It is something that happened and continues to happen in your language and memories involving real people talking about other people in situ in the heat of the fields, the waving of the hands, the confidential tone, the clanging of pots and pans, the mystery and the banality and the dust and the deftness.
And as I said, it is not so much a fact as a story, and not only a story but a gift to the “old world” that, like all gifts, demands a return. The devil story is actually a story told to capitalism, which initiated the conditions of it’s telling, awaiting the outsider in the shape of myself, a young, ignorant, bighearted galumph, to hand it over to a wider audience.
There is another gift-giving as well, working in the opposite direction, as with the account of local history focused on the immediate postslavery period after 1851 that Anna Rubbo and I published in 1975 in Spanish in Colombia for an audience largely of landless laborers and peasants in the area of fieldwork. Based on oral history as well as luck in the state archive in Popayan, then under the directorship of don Diego Castrillon de Arboleda – descendant of one of the largest slave owning families – the second half of the 19th century was excavated, that being the time when free, prosperous, and rambunctious ex-slave peasantry existed along the rivers, free of state and landlord control, so very different to the appalling situation developing apace in 1975.
Gift meets gift. A circle. The insiders tell the outsider of the devil in the cane fields, and the outsider sees capitalist reality differently from then on. Then the outsider tells the insiders the stirring tale of the nineteenth century. Thus in both directions, moving out and moving in, a process of renewal was set in motion.
This certainly speaks to what (some) anthropologists do, because the “field,” as in “fieldwork,” is actually a meeting place of worlds, an interzone consisting of fieldworker and field creating therein a collage or intertext. The anthropologist is not presenting a picture of another reality so much as inhabiting a switchback by which one reality is pictured in terms of the other, which in turn, provides a picture of that which pictures it!