The secret power of audiovisual archives: ethnographies of time and infrastructure in the Alto Magdalena
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.2133Keywords:
Temporality, infrastructure, device, hydropower, Magdalena riverAbstract
Social s tudies o f i nfrastructure h ave a ccounted f or t hese t echno-scientific a ssemblages’ non-linear, multiple, and contradictory temporalities. However, our knowledge of their plurality contrasts with our limited understanding of their capacity to synchronize multiple temporal experiences into hegemonic historical narratives. Drawing on an archival ethnography of the documentary 50 years of history for a single reality, this article analyzes the primary devices and operations of temporal production of the Betania dam in the upper Magdalena River basin. The article contributes to the scholarly literature on the non-linear temporalities of infrastructure by showing that the multiplication of temporal experiences and the production of hegemonic historical narratives are parallel and co-constitutive operations whose political effects must be read in tandem.
Downloads
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. “Time and history: critique of the instant and the continuum”. En Infancy and history: the destruction of experience, 89-105. Londres: Verso.
Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta y Hannah Appel, eds. 2018. The promise of infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12101q3.5
Andrade, Xavier y Tarek Elhaik. 2018. “Antropología de la imagen: una introducción”. Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 33: 3-11. https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda33.2018.01
Appel, Hannah. 2018. “Infrastructural time”. En Anand, Gupta y Appel 2018, 41-61.
Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand y Akhil Gupta. 2018. “Introduction: temporality, politics, and the promise of infrastructure”. En Anand, Gupta y Appel 2018, 1-38.
Axel, Brian Keith, ed. 2002. From the margins: historical anthropology and its futures. Durham; Londres: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131256
Ballestero, Andrea. 2019. A future history of water. Durham; Londres: Duke University Press Books.
Baviskar, Amita. 2005. In the belly of the river: tribal conflicts over development in the Narmada Valley. 2.a ed. Nueva Delhi: Oxford University Press.
“Betania privatiza su administración”. 1992. El Tiempo, 24 de enero. https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-19657
Boelens, Rutgerd, Esha Shah y Bert Bruins. 2019. “Contested knowledges: large dams and mega-hydraulic development”. Water 11 (3): 416. https://doi.org/10.3390/w11030416
Bosa, Bastien y Álvaro Andrés Santoyo. 2010. “Presentación del dossier”. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 46 (2): 243-248. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.1067
Bowker, Geoffrey C. 2015. “Temporality”. Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/temporality
Braun, Yvonne. 2020. “Lesotho’s white gold: the political ecology of temporality and the economy of anticipation in resource extraction and large dam infrastructural projects”. Journal of Political Ecology 27 (1): 853-876. https://doi.org/10.2458/v27i1.23250
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the arcades project. MIT Press Paperback. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cajiao Lenis, Guillermo, dir. 1984. Río Magdalena, fuente de energía. Documental. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K0FZIFh7Gk
Camargo, Alejandro y Juana Camacho. 2019. “Convivir con el agua”. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 55 (1): 7-25. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.567
Carse, Ashley. 2014. Beyond the big ditch: politics, ecology, and infrastructure at the Panama canal. Infrastructures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262028110.001.0001
Carse, Ashley y David Kneas. 2019. “Unbuilt and unfinished: the temporalities of infrastructure”. Environment and Society 10 (1): 9-28. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2019.100102
Comisión Internacional de Juristas. 2016. “El Quimbo: megaproyectos, derechos económicos, sociales y culturales y protesta social en Colombia”. International Commission of Jurists (blog). 15 de marzo. https://www.icj.org/es/el-quimbo-megaprojects-economical-social-and-cultural-rights-and-protests-in-colombia-new-icj-report/
Cons, Jason. 2020. “Delta temporalities: choked and tangled futures in the Sundarbans”. Ethnos (14 de mayo): 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1697334
Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The magical state: nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
“De Chile, los nuevos dueños de Betania”. 1996. El Tiempo, 20 de diciembre. https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-657345
Derrida, Jacques. 2017. Archive fever: a Freudian impression. Traducido por Eric Prenowitz. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo27619045.html
D’Souza, Rohan. 2006. Drowned and dammed: colonial capitalism and flood control in eastern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682175.001.0001
Duarte-Abadía, Bibiana, Rutgerd Boelens y Tatiana Roa-Avendaño. 2015. “Hydropower, encroachment and the re-patterning of hydrosocial territory: the case of Hidrosogamoso in Colombia”. Human Organization 74 (3): 243-254. https://doi.org/10.17730/0018-7259-74.3.243
Dussán, Miller. 2017. El Quimbo: extractivismo, despojo, ecocidio y resistencia. Bogotá: Planeta Paz; Asoquimbo. https://censat.org/es/actividades/lanzamiento-del-libro-elquimbo-extractivismo-despojo-ecocidio-y-resistencia
Elhaik, Tarek. 2018. “Cogitation”. Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/cogitation
—. 2019. “Anthropological film fragments from early twentieth-century Mexico: a curatorial problem”. Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/anthropological-film-fragments-from-early-20th-century-mexico-a-curatorial-problem
Fabian, Johannes. 2002. “Virtual archives and ethnographic writing: ‘commentary’ as a new genre?”. Current Anthropology 43 (5): 775-786. https://doi.org/10.1086/342640
Ferry, Elizabeth Emma y Mandana E. Limbert. 2008. Timely assets: the politics of resources and their temporalities. School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Gupta, Akhil. 2018. “The future in ruins: thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure”. En Anand, Gupta y Appel 2018, 62-79.
Harvey, Penny. 2018. “Infrastructures in and out of time: the promise of roads in contemporary Peru”. En Anand, Gupta y Appel 2018, 80-101.
Jaramillo, Camilo. 2016. “Amazonia: a laboratory for fiction”. Tesis de doctorado, UC Berkeley. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5km6b493
Kirsch, Scott y Don Mitchell. 1998. “Earth-moving as the ‘measure of man’: Edward Teller, geographical engineering, and the matter of progress”. Social Text 54: 101-134. https://doi.org/10.2307/466752
Kojola, Erik. 2020. “Divergent memories and visions of the future in conflicts over mining development”. Journal of Political Ecology 27 (1): 898-916. https://doi.org/10.2458/v27i1.23210
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2018. Sediments of time: on possible histories. Editado por Sean Franzel y Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The politics and poetics of infrastructure”. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (1): 327-343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital. Nueva York: Verso.
Muzzopappa, Eva y Carla Villalta. 2011. “Los documentos como campo. Reflexiones teórico- metodológicas sobre un enfoque etnográfico de archivos y documentos estatales”. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 47 (1): 13-42. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?pid=S0486-65252011000100002&script=sci_abstract&tlng=es
Observatorio de Conflictos Ambientales. 1984. “Cesan despachos de materiales para la construcción (Hidroeléctrica Betania, Huila)”. https://conflictos-ambientales.net/oca_bd/actions/view/2605
Osorio Valenzuela, Ananías. 2013. “Sueños, realizaciones y resistencias en torno a las centrales hidroeléctricas del Alto Magdalena durante el siglo XXI”. Revista Academia Huilense de Historia 64: 113-128. http://www.journals.academiahuilensedehistoria.org/index.php/rahh/article/view/59/58
Powerchina, Hydrochina Corp. y Cormagdalena. 2013. “The Magdalena River Master Plan”. Consultado el 15 de febrero de 2022. http://repositorio.gestiondelriesgo.gov.co/bitstream/20.500.11762/20018/8/Plan-Maestro-Rio-Magdalena-INGLES.pdf
Riles, Annelise. 2006. Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rodríguez Becerra, Manuel, ed. 2015. ¿Para dónde va el río Magdalena? Riesgos sociales, ambientales y económicos del proyecto de navegabilidad - Foro Nacional Ambiental. Bogotá: Foro Nacional Ambiental; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung en Colombia. http://www.foronacionalambiental.org.co/publicaciones/detalle/para-donde-va-el-rio-magdalena-riesgos-sociales-ambientales-y-economicos-del-proyecto-de-navegabilidad/
Rodríguez Garavito, César y Natalia Orduz Salinas. 2012. Adiós río: la disputa por la tierra, el agua y los derechos indígenas en torno a la represa de Urrá. Bogotá: Dejusticia. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/libro?codigo=738811
Salcedo Montero, Camilo Andrés y Andrea Marcela Cely Forero. 2015. “Expansión hidroeléctrica, Estado y economías campesinas: el caso de la represa del Quimbo,Huila-Colombia”. Mundo Agrario 16 (31): 35. https://memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/art_revistas/pr.6743/pr.6743.pdf
Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of modernity: the tragedy of colonial enlightenment. Durham; Londres: Duke University Press.
Segura, Fernando, dir. 1993. 50 años de historia para una realidad. Documental. https://www.facebook.com/Yaguaramemoria/
Serje, Margarita. 2011. El revés de la nación: territorios salvajes, fronteras y tierras de nadie. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes.
Serres, Michel y Bruno Latour. 1995. Conversations on science, culture, and time. Studies in Literature and Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sneddon, Christopher. 2015. Concrete revolution: large dams, cold war geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. “Colonial archives and the arts of governance”. Archival Science 2 (1): 87-109. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2015. Liquid power: contested hydro-modernities in twentieth-century Spain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the past: power and the production of history. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Uribe, Simón. 2017. Frontier road: power, history, and the everyday State in the Colombian Amazon. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
Weszkalnys, Gisa. 2015. “Geology, potentiality, speculation: on the indeterminacy of first oil”. Cultural Anthropology 30 (4): 611-639. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.08
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
