Masculinities

Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina

Eduardo P. Archetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The complex relationship between nationalism and masculinity has been explored both historically and sociologically with one consistent conclusion: male concepts of courage and virility are at the core of nationalism. In this ground-breaking book, the author questions this assumption and advances the debate through an empirical analysis of masculinity in the revealing contexts of same-sex (football and polo) and cross-sex (tango) relations. Because of its rich history, Argentina provides the ideal setting in which to study the intersection of masculine and national constructs: hybridization, creolization and a culture of performance have all informed both gender and national identities. Further, the author argues that, counter to claims made by globalization theorists, the importance of performance to Argentinian men and women has a long history and has powerfully shaped the national psyche. But this book takes the analysis far beyond national boundaries to address general arguments in anthropology which are not culture-specific, and the discussion poses important comparative questions and addresses central theoretical issues, from the interplay of morality and ritual, to a comparison between the popular and the aristocratic, to the importance of 'othering' in national constructions - particularly those relating to sport. This book represents a major contribution, not only to anthropology, but to the study of gender, nationalism and culture in its broadest sense.

PART ONE Hybridization

CHAPTER ONESituating Hybridity and Hybrids

It has been stated that the existence of two or three different racial groups inhabiting the same geographical space as early as the sixteenth or seventeenth century is a unique characteristic of the American experience. Consequently, ‘more than living side by side, members of different races came to know each other in the most intimate sense. The result was interracial progeny’ (Socolow 1996: 3). Schwartz (1996) has called this process of interracial sexual relations ‘ethnogenesis’. Latin American societies were, then and now, populated by ‘hybrids’, by people of mixed blood - mestizos, mulattos, mamelucos and pardos - and Argentina was no exception as we have seen in the previous chapter. The category of mestizo Spanish and Indian mixed - indicated both a biological and cultural hybrid (Bouysse-Cassagne and Saignes 1996). The fact that this term is twofold, biological and cultural, suggests that the awareness of miscegenation and biology tends to predominate. Moreover, the existence of the concepts of mestizo and mestizaje as emic conceptualization implied that, in the long run, these terms could include any kind of racial or ethnic mixture. The same can be postulated in relation to folk categories like creole and creolization. In this chapter I shall show the power and limitations of these conceptual models in Argentina.

As we saw in the prologue, Garía Canclini prefers to use hybridization instead of syncretism and mestizaje because it includes ‘diverse intercultural mixtures’ and ‘permits the inclusion of the modern forms of hybridization’ (1995: 11). His approach is based on the idea that, in contemporary Latin America, modern culture is heterogeneous as a ‘consequence of a history in which modernization rarely operated through the substitution of the traditional and the ancient’ (1995: 47). García Canclini put special emphasis on cultural processes in general without, in a systematic way, relating hybridization to hybrids - concrete actors - and without problematizing the existence of different models of hybridization. A more complete analysis calls for a conceptualization of the ‘hybrids’, and in my case male hybrids, and ‘hybrid moments’, spaces or objects through which rituals are elaborated and ‘free zones’ separated from other domains of society.

Models of Hybridization and the Creation of Hybrids

General

Papastergiadis has convincingly argued that the history of the hybrid must be as old as the narratives of origin and encounter (1995: 9, 1997: 257). It is obvious that the existence of a clear boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ calls for the hybrid, the mixed, the less pure, which is created by the transgression or the possibility of transgression of this boundary. In a negative sense, the hybrid can be seen or defined as a representation of danger, chaos, loss and degeneration. However, if the mixing is perceived positively the hybrid can represent creativity, complexity, amalgamation, vitality and strength. Given these situations the hybrid is always thought of in relation to purity and along the axes of inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, the model of hybridity - and the codification of the hybrids - can only emerge from circumstances in which discontinuities have been produced and policies of purification enacted. Hybridization, as Latour (1993) has reminded us so many times, was a response to practices of purification. There are no hybrids without natural and pure categories.

Young (1995: 25) has summarized the debate on hybridization in the nineteenth century in three dominant models:

1. Hybrid as a category is conceptualized as mixed but as creating a ‘pure’ form that reproduces itself, repeating its own cultural origins.
2. Hybridization as creolization involves fusion: the creation of a new form, which is set against the old form of which it is partly made up.
3. Hybridization as a chaotic process in which no stable new form, but rather something closer to a radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, a kind of permanent revolution of forms, is produced.

It is clear that hybridity makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but ‘in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different’ (Young 1995:26).

The concepts of hybridity and hybrids were developed in the natural sciences and in the practice of biology in the nineteenth century. A hybrid was an animal or a plant produced from the mixture of two species. Hybridity implies the creation of a pseudo-species as a result of the combination of two discrete species. However, in Darwin’s perspective, the emphasis was put on degrees of hybridity because the species could no longer be seen as absolutely distinct. Central to Darwin’s hypothesis is the idea that there is no essential distinction between species and varieties.

By 1861 hybridity was used to denote the crossing of people of different races (Young 1995: 6). This use implied the acceptance that the different races mixing were of different species. For reasons closely associated with the question of racism, and especially because the ‘human hybrids’ produced were successful in terms of fertility, this was taken to prove that humans were all one species. Therefore, from the end of the nineteenth century until today ‘hybridity’ and ‘hybrid’ have moved from the field of biology into key concepts for cultural criticism and political debate. In this respect, Young has stressed the significance of Bakhtin’s theory of hybridity (Young 1995:20-2). Bakhtin’s emphasis on the mixture of languages within a text, which defies authority, evidences a new way of relating the concept of hybridity to politics. The language of hybridity transforms and disrupts the singular order of a dominant code. Bakhtin writes:

Unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language changes historically primarily by hybridization, by means of mixing of various ‘languages’ co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches, in the historical as well as palaeontological past of languages. (1981: 358-9)

Bakhtin distinguishes ‘organic hybrid’ from ‘intentional hybridity’ as historical, unconscious products. Organic hybridity will tend over time towards fusion while intentional hybridity will almost by definition be a contestatory activity, a clear affirmation of cultural and linguistic differences (1981: 361). Hybridity is thus associated with resistance and cultural creativity; it is made contestatory in, for example, the case of carnival (Papastergiadis 1995: 13; Young 1995: 21). Moreover, hybridity can be defined as a kind of permanent condition of all human cultures, one which contains no zones of purity. Instead of hybridity versus purity, as in the biological use, Bakhtin’s view suggests that hybridity is one of the conditions of human creativity.

Bhabha (1985, 1994) has politicized the concept of hybridity, using it as a critique of the colonial situation and the hegemony of the national discourse based on cultural homogeneity. Hybridity appears as a discourse exposing the conflicts in colonial discourse and the various ways of living with difference. Hybridity includes explicit forms of counter-authority, moments of political change as well the importance of transgressing fixed borders. Against the concept of a homogeneous nation Bhabha stresses the importance of the migrants and the diasporic communities. Hybridity itself becomes a form of cultural difference, challenging dominant cultural values and creating liminal spaces (a ‘third space’). In this way, it is a mode for dealing with the juxtapositions of space and the combination of ‘time lag’, out of which a sense of identity that is always liminal is constructed. Friedman has correctly observed that: ‘the language of in-betweenness, even of liminality, dominates and would even seem to organize Bahbha’s call to hybridity. Words such as displacement, dis-juncture, tran-sition, tran-scendence are rife in the texts, where the enemy is that which is generally bounded and thus, for him, essentialised, (1997: 78).

The main limitations of Bakhtin’s semiotic approach and Bhabha’s literary analysis from an anthropological point of view is the distance from the commonsensical uses (the way actors themselves perceive mixing and create local categories) and, above all, the fact that they are definitions from the outside and, in this sense, powerful normative frameworks. However, I believe that we still need a view from outside that helps us to get a better understanding of the processes of self-definition and self-identification. I find Strathern’s use of the concepts, partially following Latour, most fruitful. According to Strathern hybrids as entities are products of relations. The English conceptualize themselves as hybrids in terms of their origins; ‘an astonishing mixed blend’, this ‘glorious amalgam’, which is seen as the natural generator of manifold talent (1992: 30). Strathern emphasizes the fact that in the representation of English history there are always additions to an already infinite social and cultural complexity, sustaining the imagery of ‘constant infusions of new blood’. The country’s institutions were invigorated by cross-fertilization. However, in this mixing each individual - a hybrid him/herself in the sense that he/she is the product of different beings - ‘contributed his/her unique portion without losing the transcendent characteristic of individuality that was preserved in the singularity of “the English” themselves’ (1992: 36, 83). It is central, therefore, to ask for the native conceptualization of the relationships between the particular and the general, the unique and the representative. The English have two models. On the one hand, they aggregate in the sense that individuals carry out the resonance of a tradition or a community, and in this sense their attributes contribute to its aggregate character. The individual attributes contribute to the collective. On the other hand, they imagine a transcendent and organic order (the national or the collective) that allows for degrees of relatedness or solidarity or liberty; it is like an organism that functions as a whole entity to determine the character of its parts. The English’ can similarly appear as both aggregate and organism (1992: 29). Strathern writes: ‘the aggregating concept stressed the “melting pot” symbolism of heterogeneity, the organic concept that of a redoubtable character that was only to be exemplified idiosyncratically in each individual English(man). The English were thus self-defined in an overlapping way as at once a people and a set of cultural characteristics’ (1992: 30).

In a more recent article Strathern (1996) has related hybridity to the concept of network as used by Latour. Hybrid, she proposes, is a concept used in social sciences to refer to something that is of mixed origin. It is a critique of separations and of categorical divisions. Therefore, in analysis of ethnicity, identity and popular culture, for example, it is positively related to creativity, cultural strength and political vigour. Hybridity is invoked in many analyses as a positive force in the world. If hybridity invokes openness the concept of network is needed because it: ‘summons the tracery of heterogenous elements that constitute such an object or event, or string of circumstances, held together by social interactions: it is, in short, a hybrid imagined in a socially extended state’ (1996:521). This analysis must be properly contextualized. Strathern’s methodology is based on the powerful idea of ‘cutting networks’. In this direction, Strathern proposes that if we take given networks as socially expanded hybrids then we must take hybrids as condensed networks. ‘The Euro-American hybrid, as an image of dissolved boundaries, indeed displaces the image of boundary when it takes boundary’s place’ (1996: 523).

The most important lesson that we can draw from Strathern’s framework is the insistence on the analysis of native models of hybridity, based on the way the complex relations between diversity and generalization are defined. A model of hybridity calls for diversity and pluralism, while the existence of society - and the national state - and culture calls for generalization. My main aim is to study how in Argentina diversity and generalization are conceived by the intellectual elite as well as my informants in concrete processes of hybridization. This is even more indisputable because, as in the case of England, Argentinians have explicit and implicit models of hybridization based on powerful concepts like creolization (criollización) and mixing (mestizaje). In this context according to Strathern: ‘we are dealing with people who themselves make generalisations, who imagine that they are part of larger collectivities, who act with reference to what they assume to be widespread norms and such like, and who are consequently preoccupied with what they take to be a relationship between the particular and the general’ (1992: 28).

I shall try to demonstrate that the intellectual debates of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in Argentina defined a problématique, a semantic field and a dominant discursive arena. I shall not attempt to bring about a historical synthesis of the controversies and I shall not present them in a lineal way. In this chapter I shall move from Ibarguren, a nationalist of the 1920s, to Alberdi and Sarmiento, the founders of the modern nation state in the second part of the nineteenth century, and to Lugones, Rojas and Gálvez, the modern nationalists of the beginning of the twentieth century. This perspective implies that the historical complexities of these debates will not fully be discussed.¹ My main attempt is to delineate a field of ideas in the area of political ideologies and to explore its manifestation in other arenas. Sports can be seen as constituting ‘patriotic games’ in the era of national states and internationalism, as social practices that can eventually re-create dominant ideas related to nationalism (see Jarvie and Walker 1994; Mangan 1996; Pope 1997). Once these practices are established, they will provide a kind of historical framework within which the new generations will interpret the practice in their own way. The semantic field constituted at the beginning of the twentieth century will partly condition new ideological developments defining topics and problématiques.

Local

As I pointed out before the colonial period in Latin America and in Argentina is marked by the mixing of populations, particularly the mixing of native Indians and Europeans, known by the Spanish term mestizaje. Creole cultures constituted national identities and imageries long before anthropologists discovered that the modern world we live in today is hybrid. Carlos Fuentes, the prolific Mexican writer, celebrated the quincentennial discovery of America in 1992 as the consecration of the racial mix of Spanish America, writing: ‘We are Indian, black, European, but above all mixed, mestizo. We are Iberian and Greek, Roman and Jewish, Arab, Gothic, and Gypsy. Spain and the New World are centres where multiple cultures meet - centres of incorporation, not of exclusion’ (1992: 348). The ideology of mestizaje is still today the dominant ideology of national identity in Latin America. Therefore, the groups that did not mix or are perceived as lacking the will to mix with others are considered a potential threat to this ideology. In the colonial as well as in the post-colonial periods the category mestizo was identified with the mixture of Spanish and natives and, in this sense, presupposed the existence and the reproduction of the pure Indian or other pure racialized classifications (Mörner 1971; Basave Benítez 1992; Harris 1995; Ochoa 1995; Schwartz 1996; Bouysse-Cassagne and Saignes 1996; Radcliffe 1997). This process is extreme in the case of the Dominican Republican, in which the category Indian (indios) as pure Dominican is used in order to exclude the black population, or in many countries, Brazil being a typical case, in which some mixtures are defined as better than others (Freire 1946; Krohn-Hansen 1997).

In the immigrant Argentina of the end of nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the native Indian population had been almost eliminated through the expansion of the frontier of the national state and the consequent War of the Desert in 1879. The remaining native population was portrayed as an immobile, doomed race, unable to accept mixing (mestizaje), education and modernization, stuck in the compulsion to repeat the same ineffective campaigns of resistance until, at last, they perished along with their names and their stories. For different reasons, among them wars, diseases and the massive immigration of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the black population, which constituted 25% of Argentinians in 1838, numbered less than 2% by 1900 (Reid 1980). Therefore, when the massive flux of immigrants dise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives
• PART I Hybridization
• PART II Masculine Moralities
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index