Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco

By Gaston R. Gordillo

Book Overview

Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in northern Argentina's Gran Chaco region. In the early twentieth century, the Toba were defeated by the Argentinean army, incorporated into the seasonal labor force of distant sugar plantations, and proselytized by British Anglicans. Gast n R. Gordillo reveals how the Toba's memory of these processes is embedded in their experience of "the bush" that dominates the Chaco landscape.

As Gordillo explains, the bush is the result of social, cultural, and political processes that intertwine this place with other geographies. Labor exploitation, state violence, encroachment by settlers, and the demands of Anglican missionaries all transformed this land. The Toba's lives have been torn between alienating work in sugar plantations and relative freedom in the bush, between moments of domination and autonomy, abundance and poverty, terror and healing. Part of this contradictory experience is culturally expressed in devils, evil spirits that acquire different features in different places. The devils are sources of death and disease in the plantations, but in the bush they are entities that connect with humans as providers of bush food and healing power. Enacted through memory, the experiences of the Toba have produced a tense and shifting geography. Combining extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, historical research, and critical theory, Gordillo offers a nuanced analysis of the Toba's social memory and a powerful argument that geographic places are not only objective entities but also the subjective outcome of historical forces.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822333910
• ISBN13: 9780822333913
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Like pieces of a puzzle

Gordillo's work is an excellent example of how feelings about a place are always constructed ("made, unmade, and remade") in opposition to other places and are a result of the memories of those various places. His descriptions of the Toba landscapes leave the reader with an incredible desire to be sitting under the same trees drinking maté while listening to stories of the cane farms. His argument is well laid out with each chapter being almost like one more piece of the puzzle so that by the end, the reader can almost SEE the argument as though it were a painting. It illuminates aspects of Toba life but goes beyond this by looking at how people in general deal with their memories of places. Anyone who has ever traveled out of their comfort zone and had conflicting memories about the experience needs to read this book. An all around enjoyable and enlightening read.