Evocation, and Relational and Collaborative Research. Postmodern Psycho-ethnography in action: a European look to the Muisca’sColombian Ancestral Culture

Josep Seguí Dolz

Escuela de PsicologíaSchool of PsychologySpain

www.umansenred.com

First of all… (or at the End…)

What is the Muisca’s Colombian Ancestral Culture?

I don’t know…

Do I really want to know it?

I’m not sure

Do I need to know it?

I think no

So

What I’m doing here?

I don’t know

I don’t need to know it…

Background

In the year 1973…

Kenneth J. Gergen’s “Social Psychology as History”

“It is the rare social psychologist whose values do not influence thesubject of his research, his methods of observation, or terms ofdescription”. Journal of Personality and Social Research. Vol. 26 No.2. p. 311.

Clifford Geertz’s “The Interpretation of Cultures”

“Human thinking is, first of all, a public act developed makingreference to the objective materials of common culture, andonly second is an intimate, private matter”. Tanslated fromSpanish edition. Barcelona: Gedisa. P. 82.

Method (for tis panel): Literature review

Clifford, 1984; Gergen, 2009;

Marcus, 1998; Tyler, 1987

Brief Inspirations…James Clifford

• “An interest in the discursive aspects of cultural representation drawsattention not to the interpretation of cultural ‘texts’ but to their

relations of production”. P. 13.

• “Etnographic texts are inescapably allegorical, and a serious acceptance

of this fact changes the ways they can be written and read.” P. 99.

• “Allegory draws special attention to the narrative character ofcultural representations, to the stories built into therepresentational process itself”. P. 100.

• “ Whatever else an etnography does, it translates experience intotext. There are various ways of effecting this translation, ways thathave significant ethical and political consequences”. P. 115.

• “If we are condemned to tell stories we cannot control, may we not, at

least, tell stories we believe to be true”. P. 121.

Clifford, James and

Marcus, George E.

(Eds., 1984). Writing

Culture. The Poetics

and Politics of

Ethography. Berkeley:

University of California

Press.

Brief Inspirations…Stephen A. Tyler• “Now the ocular fairy tale is finished, the mirror broken”. P. 5.

• “The fable of participant observation both reveals and obscures thepresence of the native, for participants implies a “doing together” which

might include speaking together”. P. 98.

• “Postmodern ethnography must be another kind of intertextuality whoseproject is not to reveal the other in univocal descripction (…). It must be

instead, a fantasy of identities, a plurivocal evocation of differencemaking a unity in fantasy that mimics on every page (…)”. P. 102.

• Evocation is neither presentation nor representation. It presents noobjetcs and represents none, yet it makes available through absence what

can be conceived. It is thus beyond truth and immune to the judgementof permormance. It overcomes the separation of the sensible and theconceivable, or form and content, of self and other, of language and theworld”. P. 200.

• “A postmodern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text “, P. 202.

Tyler, Stephen A. (1987).

The Unspeakable.

Discourse,

Dialogue, and Rhetoric in

the Postmodern World.

Madison: The University of

Wisconsin Press.

Brief Inspirations…George E. Marcus

• Multi-sited spaces for research: Following the People, the Thing(through different contexts), the Metaphor, the Plot, Story, or Allegory,the Life or Biography, the Conflict. P. 90-94.

• “The collaborative ideal entails the notions that knowledge creation infieldwork always involves negotiating a boundary between cultures andthe result is never reducible to a form of knowledge that can bepackaged in the monologic voice of the ethnographer alone”. P. 113.

• Culture as the object of ethnography is predicated on the notion that thedifference of others can be fully consumed, that is, assimilated to theoryand description by cracking codes of structure, through bettertranslation, and so forth. The postmodern idea of radical or surplus

difference counters the liberal concept with the premise that differencecan never be fully consumed, conquered, experienced, and thus thatany interpretative framework must remain partly unresolved in a moreserious sense than is usually stipulated as a matter of ‘good manners’ indoing interpretative work”. P. 186.

Marcus, George E. (1998)

Ethnoraphy through Thick

& Thin. Princeton:

Princeton University

Press.

Brief Inspirations…Kenneth J. Gergen

• “(…) the meaning of te performance is not te possession of the actor

alone. Its meaning is born in the coordination”. P. 74.

• “We confront additional problems when we take writings from othercultures as evidence of universality”. P. 102.

• “For the relational being there is no inside versus outside; there is only

embodied action with others”. P. 138.

• “We collaborate with others to create who we are”. P. 155.

• “To understand each other is to coordinate our actions within thecommon scenarios of our culture”. P. 165.

• “Consider, in contrast, the earlier account of multi-being (…). A more fully

relational form of writing could indeed reveal te faces of multi-being.” P. 227.

• “Scientific research is (…) a matter (…) of participating in a community of

meaning makers to achieve goals valued by this community”. P. 238.

Gergen, Kenneth J.

(2009). Relational Being.

Beyond Self and

Community. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Evocation. My (our) own definitionand reflections

• Ok, but, what can I do with this? More, what I want to do with this? Or, what I’d like to do with this?

• Perhaps I only want to come in dialogue with “Others”. Or perhaps I only want to write aboutexotic places and show beautiful pictures… Is this so?

• We can evoke by writing, taking photographs or videos, making music, dancing,…

• We can evoke to create a new reality with “Others”

• What about credibility? All I can do is to be honest… Nothing else…

“Dialogically recreate the situation or process without taking

anything for granted

and taking everything that has been given for granted”.

Rosita Suárez is a Colombian Social Psychologist who has been working with original culturesduring the last 30 years. I was impressed reading her book (with anthropologist Carlos E. Pinzón),“’Lechuza’ women. History, Body and Witchery in Boyacá” (1992). Bogotá: CEREC.

Se called me to help her in a research about indigenous mental health in Colombia.

Why me? I don’t know anything about this matter!!!

She just needed someone wo was not influenced by political and cultural context. Se neededsomeone “innocent”.

I accepted her invitation…

And…

An example: a trip to theUnspeakable

At the Colombian’s

National University.

Bogotá, December,

2013

Dialogue about the

future of Social

Constructionism in

Latin America.

Psychologists College.

Bogotá, December,

2013

Starting te trip

“Each day they remind us that we are nature and invite us tolive the teachings of the Elders, learning from their wisdom;and to walk together the ways of life, hear the wind, thetrees, the birds, the outdoors, gather our hearts to ‘thinkingbonito’ and ‘thought knitting stitch by stitch’”. RositaSuárez.

• Such concepts as “nature”, “teachings”, “Elders”, “learning”, “wisdom”, … have not the

same meaning for the Muiscas and for us.

• “Thinking bonito” is not to think in the right way, or with good intentions, or something

like this. I can’t translate “bonito” into English. I’m not sure what does it exactly mean.

What I’m doing is to co-evoke with Rosita this and a lot of other meanings.

This is Bogotá, Colombia…

Economical, comercial and cultural area

… and this is also Bogotá

Canadá Güira neighborhood and Veinte de Julio church

And this…

Canadá Güira neighborhood. Near to Entre Nubes park

Here is where the World began

"The ‘Periquera’, ancestral nameoriginated from the abundance of‘pericos’ (parrots) that existed in thisarea, the barley river that forms sevenwaterfalls, were mythological place ofworship of the spirits of the Muiscas,was energizated to accompany theirgods, Bochica and Bochué, watchersfrom high in the Iguaque lagoon... ".

There in Iguaque is where it all began ...

Is this “true”? Why not?

Eldorado

"Spanish people, and a little later English, took all the gold, quartz and emeralds.

But they could not take the real treasure of Guatavita ..."

(It is believed that the legend of Eldorado has its origins exactly in this place)

El Infiernito

Here the Muiscas raised a genuine

temple to the fertility of the land. The

temple was made of giant phalluses.

When the invaders arrived they were

horrified. His spiritual colonists believed

they were in hell, hence the name of

this sacred space for original people,

and proceeded to the temple's

destruction. There are some pieces that

help us to evoke ...

A journey at the Marketplace. Villa de Leyva

collaborative

evocation

And now… It’s time to write!!!

• When you are doing relational research,

you are changing with the process

• More than change, from CollaborativePractices we prefer to talk about

transformation

• But it is not “Me” or my “Self” who ischanging. It’s just the relationships with

the “Others” which are transformingthe reality

• And, with this, the reality is

transforming “Me”, whatever it is, Idon’t mind…

• The only thing I can do is to evokethe unspeakable “Other”. At thesame time, and through the sameprocess, the only thing I can say about“Me” is by evoking my relationships…

We are constructing a way of understanding between us, and, also,

wishing to be understood by ‘Others’…

Villa de Leyva square

We want to dialogue about a lot of things. But not only about the “exotic” ones. There are nothing “exotic” inthe Colombian’s social reality. Everything is “real”, very real… And present, too much present…

I want to know more and more about the Muisca’s culture. But also about the social problem of thedisplaced people because of the war and violence, for example. People that I have seen and known in theCanadá Güira neighborhood…

From our text in process:

Josep - “I’m feeling a little as Barley’s ‘Innocent Anthropologist’*. I am a guest (with a tribute to HarleneAnderson!**) in a country and in a culture that I don’t know anything about. I am in a country from which I onlyreceive news that have nothing to do with reality, whatever this is. Yes, Rosita is my ‘informant’, in a classicalsense. She explains to me a lot of things. Step by step I’m surprised with everything. Sometimes I’m afraid. Now Ithink I understand something. Then my understanding is blurred. I am sure of my wisdom illustrated backed bytwo thousand five hundred years of rational knowledge from classical Greece. But the next minute I think Iknow nothing; I absolutely can’t understand anything of what I'm seeing in this chaotic, but beautiful andfriendly in many ways, city. The Monserrate greets me. As always, wherever you are in Bogotá”.

Rosita – “There are many stories, memories that constructs our "identities". Unlike Mexico or Peru we did nothave a dominant group with features of state. We had many and various. A few more warriors than others. TheCaribbean, as called by conquerors, were the inhabitants of these lands. The interior was Muiscas. Bacatá wasthe territory of Zipa Sagipa. It means "Country Farm“, and Bogotá "territory minga, or of the Supreme Being."The minga is a collective work in which each person contributes. BOGOTA meaning: BO = Divinity, GO =Collective Work, TA = Farm. This territory is under the custody of two large hills: Monserrate and Guadalupe,names assigned by the Spaniards. They are the guardians, the great "legs", foundations and strengths ofancestral territory. I understand your feeling, when you say Monserrate is "greeting you, wherever you are."True, for the citizens of Bogotá, Monserrate and Guadalupe are our guide and reference. If we feel lost, we seekthe hills to guide us”.

* Barley, Nigel (1983). The Innocent Anthropologist. Notes from a Mud Hut. Illinois: Waveland Press. ** Anderson, Harlene (1997). Conversation, Language, and Possibilities. A PostmodernAproach to Therapy. New York: BasicBooks.

Discussion

• Is this Social Science, or it is just ‘only’ a way of writing, as Literature or Poetry?

• What consequences can evocation have to the work of the social researcher, or psychologist in general?

• It could be a new or complementary way of doing collaborative and relational research processes in the field

• We need to explore more all the possibilities…

THANK YOU!!!