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.