Post Diez – 4/8/2010

Santiago could be my home. It is an enormous city; a beautiful city; a prideful city; an impressive city; a disappointing city. It is no paradise, dreamland, or utopia – but that is exactly what it offers in its ambiguous feeling of homeliness where the positives of living amongst such a diverse group of people working towards making their collective livelihoods better is offset by the negatives of notions of ways it could, in fact, be different and better. Living and, to an extent, working in this city for these past few months has let me get used to its feel, its people, and its daily rhythms that has begun to make Santiago feel normal rather than in any way exotic.

Walking around Santiago, you start to notice patterns. On one block you’ll find both sides of the street completely occupied by furniture reconditioning businesses followed by a block of mini-markets. You’ll walk downtown and find the optical block, followed by the blocks for drapes and rugs. You’ll even find the particularly horrible Cafe con Piernas block the same way – coffee shops with women servers in stiletto heals with ridiculously tight and revealing uniforms serving to, of course, an all-male clientele. Think Hooters, but worse – but beside the point. Examples are abound anywhere you go and I would venture to guess that 95% of Santiago is departmentalized like this from the practical – residential, educational, industrial, transportation, governmental, and financial -- to the ridiculous – two whole blocks of 24-hour funeral parlors a couple blocks from our apartment. I’ve even found an entire shopping mall full of musical instrument stores – a seeming utopia until you find that each store sells the exact same cheap products for around the same prices. Where restaurants are centralized, such as the Mercado Central, you find the ubiquitous pleading of waiters to eat at their restaurants instead of the multitude of others occupying the same space – even though they all offer around the same menu for around the same prices. Delicious, because that’s just how good Chilean products are, but certainly annoying to deal with.

Particularly annoying are the enormous shopping malls conveniently placed in front of every transportation station – the combined enormous San Borja bus station and Estación Central train station being the best example of this. There is no going around walking through the estimated 1 km long mall to get to the local and regional buses. The stores are the same you would find in any shopping mall in the world: all over-priced and offering relatively cheap products. This is not in place by accident, it is clearly intentional -- because people will have to use that space, others will take advantage of that fact. When it’s systematically ordered, as is the Santiago example, it’s borderline ridiculous. People don’t have to buy things (as is recommended by any legal economic form), but since these businesses are all still in place, they obviously do buy in great quantity.

I have previously addressed the issues I find with neoliberal economics – the governmentally reinforced ‘free market’ for all to take part in. The departmentalization of space in Santiago is a clear example of this where no other markets can thrive with the near-homogenization of the neoliberal model. It is where the economic forces influence the cultural makeup of a place. Can an independent 24-hour funeral parlor make it in another section of the city? Probably not, since people’s minds are habitually inclined to think spatially of their city in such a way that funeral parlors can only be found in one part. What about a home-based clothing maker? An independent musical instrument store? Probably not for the exact same reasons – it’s hegemony, cultural logic, the ‘common sense’ way of how things are spatially ordered.

But, can a cheap, China-made clothing store next to another cheap, China-made clothing store make it in a mall in front of a transportation station where people have to go based on the needs of their daily lives? Easily. Is that disappointing? To me, clearly. My complaint will always be that the dominant economic model almost always predetermines people’s supposed access to the free market. In the spatially predetermined Santiago, set in place by the dictator Augusto Pinochet’s strictly enforced neoliberal economic policies in the 1970s and 80s, spaces were set up following the single model developed by economists at the University of Chicago. Success followed for those that were able to fit that model (Santiago’s president, Sebastian Piñera, is one clear example with his success in bringing credit cards to Chile in the 1970s). Others followed suit to varying degrees of success. Soon, you have the excesses of homogenization of forced competition that Santiago is quite noticeably at in the present from its past, where the only way to go is in another direction. You have to change hegemony in order to have any other economic model flourish. This is where there is hope and this is what I love about this city. It is for that same reason that I love Grand Rapids. This is why it could be home for me. That hope is exciting to be a part of.

Restaurants and stores that force their customers rethink where their food comes from is a part of that hope; coffee and tea sellers that make their customers rethink how labor was used to get them the products they love is a part of that hope; a brewery and other local, independent businesses that has their customers rethinking about their sense of community is a part of that hope. Extrapolating these small-scale efforts at rethinking economic and cultural forms to larger problematic businesses and industries such as banks, insurance companies, and food producers becomes a larger effort at kindling that hope for others to get behind. Santiago has this as well as Grand Rapids and that connects them in that ambiguous feeling of home that I feel a part of. Anywhere that I don’t feel beat down by the drudgery of monotony that a socio-politico-economic situation has the freedom to offer, I can make home -- I can be confident in that fact.

However, I will admit that it’s an idealism of home in Santiago because it is impossible to ignore the importance of family and good friends, so Grand Rapids will always be first for me. But, home for me is never going to be that exotic place that offers ‘more’ than what I’m used to, that faraway city in a country that seems more interesting where I can try connecting to its culture, that ‘utopia’ where I will have no troubles, somewhere where I can drown my cynicism of the familiar in the unfamiliar – it’s an idealism that I want to help produce rather than seemingly be perfectly premade for me; it’s unrealistic in every sense of the word. Grounded in reality, home is experiencing the positive with the negative, with the hope of helping diminish the negative for the better. Sometimes, it takes leaving the familiar and finding it in a faraway, seemingly foreign place to realize what’s important.

Post Nueve 3/18/2010 – Trabajo

I got a job in the middle of February working as a brewer at Szot Microbrewery in the San Bernardo area, just southwest of Santiago. I had started ‘training’ the week before I went on break to the south and therefore missed the havoc caused by the earthquake on the brewery (see www.szot.cl for pictures). They are only a bottling production brewery (i.e. no pub), so they lost most of the beer that had been bottled as it had crashed to the floor during the quake, but thankfully nothing happened to the beer fermenting in the numerous tanks as those were anchored solidly to the floor. The mess caused by the broken bottles and spilled beer must have been daunting, to say the least, but I missed out on the cleanup by the lucky timing of the break. Despite the mess, Szot was up and brewing a day after clean up – something that most Chilean breweries affected by the earthquake are yet to do, apparently, leading to shortages of beer.

During that week of my ‘training’, I began to realize what was going to make this experience decidedly ‘Chilean’ rather than what I was used to in Michigan. For starters, Ernesto, the brewer for Szot and my trainer, speaks pretty much exactly as much English as I speak Spanish – namely, some random vocabulary only used in the present tense. Our conversations began and still continue to be a strange hybrid of Spanish and English, with me understanding his Spanish by repeating in English, and vice versa. I’m amazed at how well it works and we both get language practice in the process by learning from one another. If nothing else, it proves how easy communication can be between two people even when the verbal form is far from concrete beyond simple commands – the goal between both sides remains just learning and understanding. It only works with patience, which Ernesto and I seem to have a lot of.

The other employees at Szot are three women that quite professionally run the bottling line (an almost 100% manual four-head filler, for anyone interested) that Ernesto lovingly calls the ‘Chicas’ or, more lovingly, ‘Chicillas’. The Chicas speak no English and our lunch breaks together are interspersed with random questions about anything and everything as they offer me their delicious homemade tomato salads and a portion of their daily 1.5-liter bottle of peach juice. I have enormous respect for these women, as they are always great workers and are constantly in a good mood. I can hardly communicate with them, but their constant cheerfulness and great work ethic is contagious and certainly welcome as an outsider.

During my first day while cleaning the spent grain out of the lauder tun, I saw Ernesto run around the corner to yell at something trying to get through the front of the warehouse-style doors to eat the spent grain sitting in blue barrels. To my surprise it wasn’t a dog or person that he was yelling at, but a small white horse that comes to try to get some free food when it smells the cooked grain wafting through the air. Ernesto had some choice words for the pony that is an almost daily annoyance as he tried pushing it back through the large doors. Little does the pony know, barley is very hard for it to digest due to its acidity and thus pretty bad for it to eat. Nevertheless, as the days have gone by the pony still shows up at the same opportune moment, but with a new fence covering the front door to keep him out, he leaves a large pile of crap as an effectively simple “F-U” to us keeping him from his free lunch. He obviously hasn’t heard our axiom that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, but in his mind I’m sure he’s thinking, “there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get what I want”. He’s not very pleasant, to say the least.

I found it hilarious that a horse could be a pest like this, but this adds to the Chilean experience where there is a fine line between the ultra-modern and the working-class traditional. The rural area of San Bernardo and its dirt roads and many Galpónes (small warehouses) tends to be on the latter side of that line in contrast to urban Santiago just to the north, but it’s here where life seems to be more culturally interesting.

Case in point: the man we were saving the spent grain for from the over-zealous horse is a youthful old man named Don José that feeds his numerous chickens with it on his family-run ranch. “Don José is a very interesting man” is Ernesto’s enormous understatement for this rapid-speaking Chilean (even by Chilean standards) who is eager to tell a story and share his life, connecting it all with his overarching philosophy of life: live well and you will be well. Don José asked me straight-away what age I thought he was, to which I honestly replied ’60 or 65 at most’. Don José is 80. Don José’s father died a few years back, he tells me, at 104 years old after having twins at age 102 with a 22 year old woman. This, Don José insists, is because of the health of his family from eating off of their own land and from their own work – but never too much of either. Their longevity and, as Don José made abundantly clear, their (extreme) potency reflects this simple philosophy of healthy living. Don José went on to tell Ernesto and I that he was the personal driver for the decisive presidents Alessandri, Frei, and, most importantly, Salvador Allende of the 1960s through the early 70s. He also is a world champion dog trainer for the Chilean police force (Carabineros) as well as a horse trainer that has led him through every part of Chile, to every South American country, as well as most of Latin America. He has five children, all in the military or Carabineros, and something tells me he isn’t done (especially if he wants to beat his father’s record). I shoveled the spent grain into the plastic-lined trunk of his old Chevy car and he gave Ernesto a burlap sack full of unwashed, fresh-laid eggs as well as two emptied 2-liter bottles of Coke full of fresh peach and plumb pulp in exchange. He complimented me on my good work in contrast to what he heard that Gringos were all lazy and fat – using hand gestures to make this point abundantly clear. “Nada todo, pero alguna” (‘not all, but some’) was my nondefensive response in bad Spanish, to which he responded with a boisterous and infectious laugh.

The first book I read on the start of this trip was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel so rich in detail and characters so complex to the point of being mythical and/or magical (hence García Márquez’s style being deemed Magical Realism), that it won him a Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a coveted “one of the best books I have ever read” honor from me. I cannot help but make a parallel between Don José’s storytelling and a character from a García Márquez novel because no matter how hyperbolic or unrealistic Don José’s accounts may seem, it’s in the way he tells them that makes it seem realistic and, in turn, not really matter if they turn out to be fake. Because you can tell that they mean so much to him by the way he speaks of them and how they relate to his underlying philosophy, they have the same effect on the listener. That is why Ernesto’s characterization of Don José is so understated and why for me as an outsider he seems to be such an significant cultural figure that I was lucky enough to have met, even just for the five minutes we talked – it’s in the way a culture can produce a family and an individual as comprehensively interesting as him. Although Gabriel García Márquez is a Columbian and Don José (most proudly) a Chilean, there is a connection just under the surface that ties their lives as Latin American storytellers, and what makes them culturally distinct from us Norteamericanos that I can not help but be fascinated by. They by no means represent all of Latino culture (if such a thing exists), but as distinct figures they leave you with a dynamic impression of the importance of cultural difference among the seeming monotony of modernism.

The week after my vacation was Ernesto’s vacation, which left me at the helm of the brewing system. Kevin, the owner and an immigrant Californian who had married a Chilean, was there for most of the days assessing the earthquake damage for the insurance company to work out, but he remained mostly in the vicinity in case I didn’t remember what I had learned from Ernesto’s expertise. Day 1 was full of small mistakes ranging from temporarily breaking the grain mill to dropping part of the hose nozzle into the kettle, but by the end of the week I was fully confident and made almost zero mistakes making two batches each of their Negra Stout and Rubia Vapor Lager. Almost.

On Thursday, my last day of brewing for the week, while running the second to last cleaning cycle on the tanks (the CIP Acid cycle to break down the minerals left from Chile’s extremely hard water), a tiny drop of acid flung into my eye while pouring it from its container to the measuring cup -- a freak accident that you avoid by always wearing eye goggles (which I was unaware that they had any). It hurt like hell. I immediately flushed my eye out with the hose for quite a few minutes while the Chicas looked on in absolute worry. I finished the acid cycle on the tanks as well as the third cycle of sanitizer to finish out the day, but my eye remained a pretty enormous (and red) concern. I finished, told the Chicas that all was OK so they wouldn’t worry, took the bus and metro back home (a 45 minute to an hour daily commute), and came home to ask Molly’s expertise on my bright red, but not too painful at that point, eye. She of course wanted me to go to the hospital that is right by our place on Parque Bustamente. An intense flushing and cleaning by an Ophthalmologist, 2.5 days of wearing a patch over my eye, 2 prescriptions, and 3 appointments later, I’m back to normal as the acid had hit the white part of my eye – luckily unaffecting my vision. Had I done nothing, the Ophthalmologist said, I would have a lazy right eye because the acid would have kept corroding. Thank you, Molly. Lesson learned: always wear eye protection.

As this experience working in Chile doing my favorite type of work I’ve ever had in my life in brewing goes on, I realize that I’m getting much more of an experience than I could ever hope to fit in a couple lines on a résumé. Yes, I know that it will look great for a future employer or a banker for a start-up loan that I have this international experience under my belt. However, the brewing system is largely the same that I could find in the US or Europe, and the same steps are taken in Chile as in anywhere in the world to make beer – it’s a relatively simple, but enjoyable, process. What makes me excited for the weeks ahead working at Szot is not to just hone in on these ‘employable skills’ that I have gained or to make any kind of money, it is what else lies out there that can make my work an enjoyable part of my daily life. It’s in meeting Don José, working with Ernesto and the Chicas, and dealing with the horse that I will really take from this job that mean the most because I so enjoy what I’m doing and the surprises each day brings (even if it is a drop of acid in the eye – never again, though). Making beer is enjoyable work in itself no matter where I am, but it is nothing compared to what it offers as a daily experience working in Chile – and it is for this that I am extremely lucky and grateful.

Post Ocho 3/14/2010 - Terremoto

When the earthquake hit, Molly and I were on a bus travelling south from Santiago to Puerto Varas. We never felt a thing, fortunately, as we were sleeping and any shaking that may have awakened us was quickly excused in our still sleeping minds as the bus going on a rough patch of road – ridiculous as it may seem given the strength of the earthquake. When I fully woke up before dawn, the bus was stopped. With the earthquake happening around 3:30 am, this was probably right after the earthquake hit, but having no idea what had just happened I assumed we had made a stop to pick up more passengers and I never checked the time. When I woke up again after dawn, it was to an ominously foggy day where we could see cars and semis parked alongside us stretching into the cloaked distance. We saw families walking and riding bikes south while staring at all the vehicles stranded on the highway. Still having no idea what was going on, we mumbled angrily at the static radio playing on the bus speakers and asked the bus attendant what was happening and if he could turn off the radio. He told us that an earthquake happened, some people were hurt, and that was it. Molly’s further questioning yielded nothing from the attendant as well as from the other passengers and our bus stayed waiting for the next four or five hours.

When we were finally able to move, the bus had to be backed up and pulled onto the opposite side of the highway to make it to a makeshift dirt road to keep going south. When we saw that a pedestrian bridge had fallen over the middle of the highway just ahead of where we had stopped, crushing at least two cars that had been blocking our path, we had only begun to understand that something bigger than what the attendant had alluded to was happening or had happened. When we passed another downed pedestrian bridge off the side of the highway, this one crushing a semi carrying fruits and vegetables, a fear began to take hold out of our unanswered questions. In a sad attempt at distraction, the attendant put on a terrible Nicholas Cage war movie for much of the rest of the trip as we looked for more evidence out the window of what had happened to no avail. Alas, the volcano-dotted horizon of the Lake District we were now driving through calmed and distracted us from the unknown terror that had literally happened outside, and the ridiculous fake Hollywood-style terror that the Spanish-overdubbed Nicholas Cage was apparently saving everyone from on the loud TV screens.

We finally got to Puerto Varas about 6 hours behind schedule to a completely normal, albeit quiet, Saturday afternoon. We found a hostel after two failed attempts and made our way for much needed showers when we saw what two girls who were using the hostel’s only computers were looking at: BBC coverage of the earthquake of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake. We asked them if they had felt anything in Puerto Varas and they said that they indeed had been woken up by it and had only been able to find information on the Internet within the last 20 minutes when it was working again. We asked to use the computers to check our mail after they were done, only to find a mountain of concern from our friends and family back at home via email and facebook. It was then, some 13 hours after the earthquake, that we finally understood the enormity of what had happened and, moreover, how lucky we were to not have been affected by it. It was a moment for us somewhere between serendipity and privilege to have escaped all of it in Santiago by a single night due to the opportune timing of Molly’s spring break from her university, and our decision to go down far south for it because of the simple fact that we could afford it. We spent the next nine days travelling the south between Puerto Varas, the island of Chiloe, and Valdivia living amongst those Chileans largely unaffected personally from the recent tragedy, but all collectively quietly reeling from its effect on their nation.

Post Siete – 2/15/10

Molly and I travelled to Pucón the weekend before last, which marked our first venture to Chile’s infamous ‘south’ that has left Santiago feeling empty from its inhabitants enjoying vacation down there during the hot summer months. Pucón is in the northern part of Chile’s lake district, which is full of lakes, rivers, waterfalls, and volcanoes all nestled between the cliffs of the Andes. It’s absolutely unique and beautiful down there – that’s why it’s a permanent vacation spot for so many Chileans as well as other world travelers. The only problem Molly and I had, though, was the weather. Oh, the weather.

The town of Pucón is situated on a peninsula between Lago Villarrica and the enormous Villarrica Volcano. The lake and the volcano are pretty well visible from any open space in the town, the only problem is that we never really saw the infamous volcano that makes the town so perfectly picturesque because of the constant veil of clouds concealing the top of it. This was disappointing because you could see the enormous mountain rising in the distance and see the beginning of its snow-covered top only to be abruptly stopped by the cloud line. Despite the four days of cloud-covered disappointment, we were able to see much of what makes the Lake District so amazing beyond its volcanoes.

We arrived on Friday after a 10-hour overnight bus ride and decided to check out the volcanic sand beach on Lago Villarrica first. It was a cold and cloudy morning that eventually gave way to a hot summer afternoon as clouds began to break up to bring patches of intense sun that brought people out of their homes and hotels. As Molly and I lay on the beach, we would go between uncomfortably hot in the sun to uncomfortably cold in the cloud cover – a temperature difference that had to have been around 15 degrees or so, something I have never quite experienced before. When we started to see the streaks of a rain cloud making its way across the lake, we decided to give up and go to our hostel to plan what to do for the weekend amongst the many options.

After a night spent in the town with a great meal and a bottle of wine, we woke up early to check the weather situation to decide what to do for the day. At 7:30 in the morning, I made the call based on the mostly-clear skies to take a bus up to the beautiful and enormous Huerquehue national park to spend the day hiking to numerous lakes and waterfalls – despite the weather report predicting a pretty decent chance of rain. We took the bus up a winding dirt road past ranches carved into the hillside while clouds started to build. Once we got to Huerquehue and started to make our way on its miles-long main path up the mountains, we saw how incredibly beautiful the place was and we forgot for a second about the threat of the weather based on our surroundings. About an hour in, it started to rain and it never stopped – but we pressed on anyway due to my obstinacy overcoming Molly’s well-reasoned skepticism (sorry again, Molly, if you’re reading this…). Despite the rain, despite the cold, despite the increasingly difficult path up the mountains, I had to keep going on because of the beauty of the place only partially cloaked by the dreary weather. Climbing up the path through breaks of dense forest and bamboo (!) groves, we would get glimpses of the lake and valley below us that were beautiful beyond words (of which I have pictures of that do it no justice, I assure you). Also, the fact that the map I had in my hands showed so much to see ahead of us, I could not allow us to turn around despite the rain soaking through our layers. We got to the top of the mountain, saw two more beautiful-beyond-words lakes, and decided to head back. It took about 2.5 hours to make our way back as the trail started turning itself into a series of mini-waterfalls and ponds down the side of a mountain. Even this was beautiful in hindsight, but our cold soaked bodies only wanted to be on the bus back to Pucón with its hot showers, dry clothes, warm beds, and bottles of wine… I still say it was worth it – check out my pictures for further proof of this. Even Molly agrees with this, to an extent.

Our third day was spent in Pucón getting our clothes from the previous day washed and dried while we explored our surroundings. We found the cemetery on the edge of town situated on the side of a hill, walked up and through it, and found an amazing view of the sights below and in the far distance. We made our way back through the less touristy parts of the town where kids played football (the real kind, of course), music emanated from the tightly built houses, and people walked about on the open streets. I am still jealous of their lives surrounded by such all-encompassing natural beauty compared to the flat, non-volcanic lands of Michigan. Hell, I’ll go as far as to say that the black-sand beaches and the mountain-surrounded crystal-clear lakes surely beats any Great Lake – even the amazing cliffs of Lake Superior. I’m a passionate Michigander, but I’m telling you this place is far more impressive in its natural beauty. But, I digress.

Our fourth day – Monday -- was predicted by the forecasters, our hostel workers, and various tour guides as ‘the’ day to go out and see the sights. It was supposed to be the cloudless, sunny, perfect day that we were all hoping for when the sun fought through the clouds on the previous days that gave us so much hope and optimism. It turned out as grey as the other days, perhaps even more so than the previous days, but at least there was no threat of rain. We rented bikes and made our way down a black dirt road towards Lago Caburgua to the east. We rode along the side of the Rio Caburgua up a valley where many ranches filled the spaces between the mountains and the river. We stopped along the way as we saw the cloud line just above us on the mountains to our north to eat a lunch of Molly’s perfect concoction – peanut butter and avocado sandwiches. We eventually made it to the ‘Ojos del Caburgua’, a spot of numerous waterfalls falling into turquoise, crystalline pools in a dense forest of knotty trees with exposed roots over the rocks. It was beautiful. We took several pictures and kept moving to get to the lake of the same name. The dirt road took us out to the main highway with 5 km to go of nothing but uphill. We eventually got to the lake to relax on its beach and enjoy its perfect (albeit cloudy) vista for a bit before heading back on the (thank god) mostly downhill road towards Pucón. We enjoyed an amazing barbeque cooked for us by hostel hosts before quickly jetting off to the bus station and on to Santiago through the night.

Despite the persistence of the cloudy, grey, and rainy weather, we had an amazing experience in Pucón and its incredible landscape. Rather than dampen our spirits of the place, the clouds acted to cover up only what we want to see more and what will eventually lead us to come back. Next time, I promise myself we won’t leave until we find that perfect day.

Post Seis 2/9/2010 – An exercise in anthropology

An important concept to cultural anthropology is hegemony, which in general is cultural logic or a ‘common sense’ to a given culture. There is a mountain of meaning behind understanding hegemony, but it is an informative way of seeing the cultural distinctiveness of every individual as a product of collective human minds over the course of many generations in a given culture, society, and now increasingly, the world. Hegemony is a product of popular discourse naturalized through discursive practice, which is always evolving – that is, people’s thinking aligns to culturally specific ways of viewing the world through influence, practice, and reinforcement. Hegemony is complex: it helps explain language, slang, accent, etc, as well as sociopolitical beliefs such as gender roles, governance, class, race, etc. Hegemony is always adapting, changing, and extremely hard to actually pin down and define due to this (technology being an important example of this – imagine telling a Yanomami of the Amazon everything about the iPhone; their cultural logic would have no idea what to make of such a thing, let alone how to use it; then tell them about the iPad) – however, by recognizing hegemony, we see what we have in common with others, what makes the human mind in general so complex, and what we deem ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’ about our social world beyond science is really a product of our collective minds. Scientific reasoning underlies hegemony as objective reality, while hegemony is the reality given to us by our subjectivities, to put it purely academically.

Modern anthropology goes to great depths in understanding hegemony in our globalized world of open borders, open economies, governmental deregulation, the enormous growth and power of the private sector, widespread media influence – essentially the global ‘free market’ or neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is an economic model championed by University of Chicago economists since the 1970s (but its roots go much deeper, which I will not dwell on here) with the likes of Milton Friedman and his influence on Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. It essentially gives absolute power and freedom to the market for all individuals in all societies to take part in, with each government acting to support its people entering the free market (through job training programs and buttressing the growth of the private sector through tax breaks, subsidies, and the like) – which is largely what we have today in the US with few exceptions. Classical liberalism relies on social programs supporting individual rights such as unions, welfare, and social security to fill in the spaces and inconsistencies that a capitalist society inherently leaves in its path, but what makes neoliberalism even ‘liberal’ at all in this sense is how it approaches the market for everyone to be a part of. ‘Neoconservatism’, on the other side, takes neoliberalism’s economic and social principles but with the added ‘state-centric’ importance in protecting national borders, patriotism to the nation state, and an enormous national defense to protect it all.

The main line of argument against this economic approach is that it reifies the ‘free market’, or tries to make reality out of the abstract. The ‘free market’ we take part in is a product of hegemony just like Coke advertising is to an American mind and because it is an abstract concept and not objective reality, when we rely so heartily on it as neoliberalism does, great inconsistencies and social problems appear. Neoliberal hegemony makes common sense out of the competitive ‘nature’ of humans as applied to the politics of the economy, but that ‘nature’ is entirely subjective and that is what is key to this understanding (and why Social Darwinism via Herbert Spencer was disproved even before the 20^th century as attempting to reify ‘race’ and ‘class’ in a hierarchical system). The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is common sense to neoliberal hegemony because of a reified individual socioeconomic status – but there is nothing more real about that than saying money grows on trees, hegemonically speaking – socioeconomic status became imprinted in logic as soon as neoliberalism deemed it so as an economic force, with morality being more associated with poverty than ever (i.e. drug use, welfare dependency, criminality), rather than an enormous shortcoming of our economic system we have in place in people’s access to the ‘free’ market of realistic growth (beyond a plethora minimum wage jobs with no upward mobility that no one really wants – besides immigrants whose hegemonies make these low-level jobs seem adequate in comparison to the lives they have had in another country). One could argue ideologues such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck make their careers on defending the social effects of this very reified hegemony of the free market, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.

What is most prescient of the issue is that neoliberalism, globalization, and the ‘free market’ are the products of US-led western minds, and when it is forced (or coerced through the World Bank, IMF, NAFTA, etc.) onto other countries, societies, and cultures it is an instance of imperialism, NOT the reified ‘succumbing to the forces of modernity’ that we reason in our hegemonic minds. What our western hegemony erases in its path of dominance is extremely important to cultural anthropologists, myself (obviously) included. Chile has a brutal history in dealing with this, as well as much of the Latin American continent of which I intend to further my study in.

I feel that I need to include this post on hegemony and neoliberalism before I delve deeper into Chilean history, its key social figures, and its modern society that I plan to include in later posts dealing within the context of anthropological understanding. Without this introduction I would get ahead of myself too fast before showing why these concepts matter so much to anthropologists (and thus what can be learned from anthropology) and how change is indeed possible, at the very least from this point of view of looking at hegemony through discursive practice and its effect on the individual (for more on this, see J.K. Gibson-Graham’s A Postcapitalist Politics). What underlies all of this is my belief that culture is what makes humanity so unique and its differences so illuminating and important to our modern world that, in turn, makes my education in anthropology so necessary and rewarding. With neoliberalism as a global force actively wiping out cultural distinctiveness in each society’s reified ‘path to modernity’ (not to mention the very real disastrous environmental effects it leaves on each ecosystem with its large-scale industry and agriculture) we lose so much of humanity in the local knowledge we can all learn from that cultures produce through their own hegemony rather than from inheriting ours (my post on the bar scene in Bellavista further illuminates this problem that I find). So, bear with me while I delve into why Chile matters in the context of all this.

As for the Political Situation…

This week before last, Chile held its second round of National Elections and the center-right candidate, Sebastian Piñera, won with a small majority over the center-left Eduardo Frei. During our first few weeks here, we experienced a bit of the election fervor with the candidates smiling faces pasted on cheesy billboards all over Santiago and small flag-carrying rallies showing their support for the candidates at opportune times and places across the city. Nothing felt entirely urgent about the election and this was reflected by apathetic responses about the political scene in Chile by people we had talked to along the way. The night Piñera won, the only thing different about Santiago was the ubiquitous blaring of car horns from all corners of the city, a sound seemingly equal in support of and in disgust to the news of the election.

For a little history behind the election, Michelle Bachelet is the current president with over an 80% approval rating over her four years in office and she is a socialist from the center-left Concertacion coalition that has been in charge of Chile (in various forms from Socialist to Christian Democrat) over the last twenty years since the brutal fascist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Eduardo Frei was already president in the late 1990s that got the ticket then based on his father being an important president of the left of the pre-Allende, pre-Coup era. Frei’s presidency was marked by a general rise in the economy based on global (neoliberal economic) trends and the Chileans we talked to say all they remember about his presidency is that ‘he went on a lot of trips’. His campaign promised to continue the popularity of Bachelet’s policies. So, exciting and inspiring candidate, he was not.

Sebastian Piñera is a billionaire who owns a national TV station, part of the national airline and the national soccer team, and loads of other investments that he made through the success of the Chilean economy from the 80s onward. He has run for president for the past couple elections, but was always soundly defeated by the more popular Concertacion candidates. His win has made his business interests confusing for Chileans, as I gathered from talking to one man, and he has to sell everything off before taking office to ensure impartiality to his private interests. Just like Dick Cheney and Haliburton, right? Right.

Making matters more difficult for Piñera was Chile’s historical experience with parties from the right – namely the (American influenced) Pinochet era of brutal authoritarian oppression, secret police, thousands of deaths and disappearances, and a disastrously failed neoliberal economic plan that left unemployment and hunger high for the majority (to which I will write another post about because of its importance to Chilean history and national character, as well as to my own academic interest – more on that later). He was up against a mountain of mistrust of the right and his platform was based on not being politically connected to the Pinochet era (although he certainly benefitted economically at the expense of the majority based on his interests) and wanted to offer change from the now-lackluster Concertacion coalition. The Concertacion coalition’s apathetic and uninspiring appeal to voters was based on a “don’t go right” plead. It was an opportune time for Piñera and the right, by all accounts, and Frei barely put up a convincing fight.

No one we have talked to actually voted in the elections. Some showed support for either candidate, but certainly felt disenfranchised by the whole political process. I cannot blame them. Politics of Chile is largely based on your name and your connections (sound familiar, Bush? Clinton?) and those in the congress and in presidency have mostly had family historically involved in politics. The candidates are not seen as inspiring figures, but rather a pick of the lesser-of-two-evils in a world of private sector economic successes for Chile that people more want to associate themselves with – that’s where Piñera was able to find his calling as a private-sector prodigy over Frei’s, well, still-lucky-to-be-in-power positioning.

For me and for many, before the run-off vote between Piñera and Frei, there was an independent candidate named Marco Enriquez-Ominami (MEO) from the left that won 20% of the vote that was particularly exciting. He is a socialist who actually wanted to start changing Chile’s socially conservative institutions regarding gay rights and women’s reproductive rights, among many other initiatives. From what I’ve been informed, it’s a first for Chilean politics – it wasn’t even debated between Frei and Piñera. MEO is a filmmaker and a Paris-educated intellectual that rallied the younger generation of the left around the inconsistencies in the ruling center-left party regarding social class and individual rights, and to get 20% of the vote before the runoff, not to mention being only in his late 30s, as well as being the son of an important counter-figure of the 1973 military coup, shows that he may be an important figure for years to come in Chile. After this lackluster election and the disenfranchisement of many of the people in their national politics, Chile’s future certainly looks interesting from MEO’s angle.

Post Cinco 1/27/10

This last weekend was spent just southeast of Santiago in the Cajon del Maipo. It was an easy trip from Santiago, about an hour on public transportation totaling less than $2 each. We stayed in one of the many tiny towns of the Canyon’s one main road in San Alfonso at a small Hostel/B&B called Los Castaños. The owner, Luciana, was extremely nice and she gave us a private room and bath, a rarity in the Hostel world. We also got breakfast every morning consisting of eggs from the numerous chickens that roamed the property, fresh fruit juice, great coffee, and homemade bread and jam. It was all very luxurious feeling, made even better by the incredible view that the property offered with its many grapevines, fruit trees, and flowers sandwiched between the two mountain ranges making up the valley.

Day 1 was spent exploring the town and sitting by the Maipo river (the fastest and most violent river I have ever seen, the pictures do it no justice), finished with a bottle of wine at home and an excellent dinner at a restaurant in San Alfonso. The restaurant served really good crepes, but the memorable part of going here was meeting the people that ran it. The owner and our server was apparently a famous Chilean rock star in the late 80s who used to play stadiums of up to 60,000 people – this was all told to us by a Chilean woman who lived and worked at the property where the restaurant was who had lived in New York for years and spoke perfect English. He played us some of his music and I have to admit it was pretty good, as it sounded like a Spanish-language Smiths or The Cure and I’m disappointed that I didn’t write down the name. We also found out from the woman that Luciana, our Hostel owner, was this man’s sister (to which we found out more about this man via Luciana that he quit the band after becoming quite a mystic – something reinforced by our experience meeting him). The woman also told us that they were starting a commune on the property and her son (who is an artist and an underground Santiago rapper, which they played us some of his music) was camping in the backyard on one of his many visits to her and the communal family. Interspersed with all this were numerous children and other adults of the commune coming through the place and making it an incredibly interesting and engaging atmosphere. We talked until late and made the moonlit walk back to our hostel.

Day 2 started by trying to catch the bus to other locations in the Canyon when the family that was also staying at the hostel offered to give us a ride in their car to where they were going – a waterfall somewhere in the south. We went with them in a packed car of a husband and a wife, two children, the husband’s mother, and Molly and I. We got to know them well over the next two days and they were exceedingly gracious people. We ended up not making it to the waterfall due to the husband’s decision to turn around (where we saw one waterfall in the distance, but no way to get close to it), but we had a beautiful ride up the mountains instead and a nice stop by the river where people had camped around some natural pools. We eventually made it back and Molly and I were left to our own devices of what to do for the rest of the day.

We walked around asking many of the locals where to go hiking but we never got a complete answer because all the property around us was owned by businesses, residential, or just ‘private property’. This became extremely disappointing as we walked and saw the natural beauty surrounding us, but no easy way to experience it (not even a single hiking trail that we could find) without paying someone to take you there or use their property and/or services. It’s a disappointing fact of the modern world that a price has been put on the experience of nature, based on a past mad rush to buy up land for private use rather than preserve natural spaces for public interest. Because the El Morado National Park was about a two-hour ride away with no easy answer as to how to get there (besides a once-daily bus that we long missed), we decided to trek on and find something.

We finally did find something where we saw groups of people camping beside a stream leading to the Maipo River that went up the eastern mountains beyond view. We decided to walk up it based on a recommendation and it stands as the best part of our trip. The rocky stream eventually runs up into its own small canyon (small in relation to the Maipo Canyon we were in) with multiple waterfalls the higher up you go. In the length of the stream towards the waterfalls (cascadas) were people setting up camp in whatever space they could find between the large boulders and the stream. It was an amazing sight, something to which I know no parallel in the US. As Molly and I made the hike up, we talked to many of the people as to what lay ahead (as we really did not know much about the hike) and the people were very nice in telling us about the place as well as being interested in us. The atmosphere was amazing – you would walk up a steep path around boulders only to find more campsites of people eager to say hi and be friendly to you, giving you the best route of how to make it up the stream, by the many rocks, and follow its ambiguous path toward the beautiful cascadas. It was in this that I realized that people were camping in this area for the simple reason that it was the only public land for miles in a canyon enveloped in a picturesque landscape dotted with ‘private property, no trespassing’ signs on fences and walls. These people were here as an expression that you can’t put a price on nature, that there will always be spaces like this for everyone to enjoy, and that the atmosphere based on the character of the people making it up who realize this freedom makes the experience that much more free and liberating, because there’s simply no price tag to be put on it. Really, why put an impediment on something that we all collectively want to enjoy for free? We eventually made it up the canyon to the second cascada (of a supposed five, but we saw no way of making it further up), in an amazing display of natural beauty that my pictures try to, but never will truly represent. The walls of the canyon were thinly separated by the river rushing over the numerous rocks and boulders breaking up the stream, and here we were standing in it, taking it all in. We made our way back home right before dusk, reeling over what we had just seen over a bottle of Chilean wine.

Day 3, we decided to go rafting down the Maipo before heading back to Santiago. I had never been whitewater rafting before (my closest experience being tubing down the awfully tame Muskegon River, by comparison) and it stands as a great experience. I simply can’t describe what being on a river so fast and so violent in its whitewater rapids feels like other than to recommend you experience it for yourself. To be on the Maipo, to take on its rapids in an inflatable raft with 6 other people, and have all-too-brief glimpses of the variation in the incredible landscape surrounding you at all times is simply too much for words. Molly and I loved it and could barely lift our arms after the workout we unknowingly endured. We got a ride back to Santiago from a nice couple sharing our raft, stopped for some mote con huesillos (a Chilean specialty of peaches, juice, and wheat kernels – bizarre but refreshing, I assure you) that they treated us to, and said our goodbyes after making future plans for travelling to wine festivals at harvest in March. Once again, Chile’s landscape and its people made this experience memorable, and we plan to go back to the area soon to see the El Morado National Park that we missed this time around with its hot springs, glaciers, waterfalls, huge peaks, volcanoes, and, well, everything else that makes nature impossible to ignore.