Diferencias estructurales: monumento, monumentalismo y monumentalidad .1 Monumento

‘‘Nature’’ is an ambivalent term, meaning both what is other to us and what is essentially ourselves. Even as ourselves (our characters, our bodies, our selfhoods), nature is often ‘‘other,’’ that from which we attempt to separate ourselves and upon which we are dependent, which we attempt to control but which always escapes our reach.

Four kinds of nature as both other and self-defining—ecological, environmental, life science, and coevolutionary—seem to have risen to the top of political, philosophical, and moral agendas in the past quar-ter century: (1) so-called natural catastrophes and the problems tradi-tionally associated with the control of nature; (2) industrial accidents and the unintended negative consequences of new technologies asso-ciated with first-order industrial processes and the military-industrial complex and with renewed calls for deliberative democracy, social accountability, environmental justice as well as the older environmen-tal terms of remediation, preservation, and conservation; (3) contesta-tions over agricultural and medical biotechnologies and the life sci-ences more generally and their potential for reorganizing conceptual categories of life, the viability of human beings and their habitats as well as more targeted concerns about genetic and pharmacological enhancements and inequalities; (4) shifting relations with companion species, both domesticated, including modified organisms for medical research, and wild, particularly viruses, such as Avian flu strains that map the changing relations among species and habitats.

We live (again) in an era in which new ethical and political spaces are thrown up that require action and have serious consequences, but for which the possibilities of giving adequate reasons ahead of the decision making quickly run out. Traditional ethical and moral guides seem not always helpful, particularly when some of the very categories of discussion (such as nature) seem to have morphed, disaggregated, and become distributed. We are often left to negotiate multiplicities of

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interests and trade-o√s in legal or other tournaments of decision mak-ing over time. As an anthropologist, I am interested in the ways in which emergent forms of life embed institutional and ethical orienta-tions, invenorienta-tions, and productivities and in how these vary or contrast in di√erent places and times. Are there pressures toward new reflexive or second-order modernization institutions? Or do we fail to learn from one crisis to the next, allowing involution of institutions, hier-archies, and sanctioned behaviors? What social, literary, and material technologies are used to frame and negotiate trade-o√s, crises, and dilemmas? I take it as given that ‘‘one cannot change only one thing’’:

interconnections are what are interesting, puzzling, and surprising and what spur to reframings and new institutions. This might be called the ecological rule.

Narrating First Nature: Catastrophe, Deep Play, Repetition, and Social-Ecological Learning

As the devastation of Hurricane Katrina unfolded in 2005, I wondered if it was following a radio script of 1931 by Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Die Mississippi Uberswemmung 1927’’ (‘‘The Flooding of the Mississippi 1927’’). Benjamin did a series of radio ‘‘children’s stories’’ on catastro-phes, the Lisbon earthquake of 1753 being another celebrated topic.

Both tales continue to have resonances today. In the Lisbon quake tale, Benjamin asked if new predictive technologies like seismology for earthquakes and satellite monitoring for hurricanes would make any dif-ference. In the Mississippi River tale, Benjamin directly addressed social failures. The Lisbon earthquake was felt as far as Southeast Asia; the tsunami that devastated coastal Acheh and Sri Lanka in 2004 is rarely discussed as one in a long series that will continue as global warming continues and to that degree is not simply natural or an act of God;

neither is it discussed enough as an event that has social implications for how, for instance, coastal communities are sited and protected.

At issue in the Mississippi Valley in 1927 was not only the struggle against the meandering of the great river to make it stay in its banks and flow more ‘‘e≈ciently’’ from north to south. More to the point for Benjamin was the dynamiting of the dikes protecting rural regions, forcing the rural poor to sacrifice for the capital city of New Orleans.

Troops were called out to suppress the threat of civil war. As in 2005, St.

Bernard Parish was flooded, but in 1927 the breaking of the dikes was neither a natural nor a necessary event, but a political decision to send a message to the New York and Chicago financial institutions that

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24. GOES-12 satellite image showing the status of Hurricane Katrina, August 28, 2005, at 1200Z, or 7 a.m., est. Credit: nasa Goddard, Space Flight Center.

sures would be taken to protect their capital. New Orleans was not only the great port for agriculture, but also the banking center for the sugar and cotton interests of the Mississippi Valley. The banks were nonethe-less wiped out, and agriculture, already in depression, was further devastated. Poor African-American sharecroppers in Greenville, Mis-sissippi, and elsewhere, as John M. Barry details in The Rising Tide (1997), his book about the flood of 1927, were prevented from evacuat-ing, lest they leave for good, and at gunpoint were pressed into rebuild-ing the levees, work that was paid at a dollar a day. Echoes might be heard in the Bush administration’s lifting, in 2005, of the rules on paying workers the going rate and bringing in of fresh Mexican labor from Texas rather than employing either local labor or the many local illegal Mexican immigrants hiding from the authorities in the devasted city and surrounding areas. Benjamin commented on the destruction of the electronic communications system that ran along the levees. In 2005, again, one of the system failures was our much-vaunted communica-tions networks, hampering first responders and rescue workers.

As a coda, Benjamin added the story of the three brothers stranded on a roof. Despairing that any rescue boats would stop for them, one

25.1 and 25.2. New Orleans before and after hurricane Katrina: August 27, 2005 and August 30, 2005, 11:45 a.m. Images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (modis) on nasa’s Terra satellite. After the hurricane struck, dark pools of water cover the eastern half of the city. Lake Pontchartrain balloons west of the city, and is separated only by a narrow strip of land from Lake Maurepas.

Credit: modis Land Rapid Response Team at nasa gsfc. (http://earthobservat ory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5806.)

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jumped to his death just before the other two were rescued. This figures as a miniature to the larger story and is part of Benjamin’s polemic against techno-optimism. Catastrophes, Benjamin says, blast us out of the continuum of history and provide illuminations of dif-ferent orderings of nature, history, limits to strategic planning, cost-benefit accounts, and other claims of rational prudence. They function analogously to traditional theological parables of human beings’ best-laid plans going awry because of their inevitably partial knowledge.

The flood of 1927, caused by heavy rains from August 1926 through the spring of 1927, displaced over a million people from the lower Mississippi (Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf Coast). Some 23,000 square miles flooded from Virginia to Oklahoma. People took refuge on the tops of levees, and 660,000 were fed by the Red Cross.

The flood was a transformative event in a number of regards. First, Barry argues, it dramatically changed the way Americans thought about the federal government’s responsibility for its citizens. The fed-eral government felt little obligation to provide food or shelter. Presi-dent Calvin Coolidge refused to visit the disaster areas but did send Herbert Hoover, whom he empowered as a cabinet level o≈cer and put into the military chain of command. Hoover coordinated the relief e√orts of the Red Cross and other agencies. The newsreel imagery of the disaster and Hoover’s coordination of relief propelled him into the presidency. Some of this footage can be seen in the documentary Fatal Flood, produced by Chana Gazit (2001).

Second, the flood changed race relations in the Delta and across the United States. Three times as many African-Americans migrated to Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles at this time than during the 1930s. Previously, because of a general labor shortage, the workers and sharecroppers may have been treated relatively well, but after the hampering of evacuation and forced labor, patrimonial relations with plantation owners was broken.

Third, the flood changed the way in which the Army Corps of Engi-neers attempted to control the river. From trying to work against the river’s momentum, containing the river within narrow banks to in-crease speed of water flow and self-dredging for navigation—the so-called levees only strategy—the corps moved to a strategy of working with and leveraging the flow of the river, directing it via outlets and [James] Eads jetties. In 2005, a design flaw eerily similar to the levees only strategy operated: canals built in the 1960s to speed shipping funneled Katrina storm surges from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, and the city, adding to the destruction (Bohannan and Enserink 2005).

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The Flood Control Act of 1928 initiated the largest civil engineering project, Project Flood, ever undertaken in the United States and shifted relations between the federal government and the states, constructing safety valves, controlled spillways, fuse-plug levees. In the 1940s the Mississippi Basin Model, a forty-acre physical model of the river, was built with German prisoner of war labor. It was used as an experimental system for testing large floods and control systems until 1973.

Whether Katrina in 2005 will have similar transformative e√ects remains to be seen, but a number of features articulate even broader concerns than those of 1927. There are suggestions of connections with anthropogenic climate warming, not just from civilian addiction to fossil fuels, but even possibly from Cold War military experiments’

disrupting of the chemical and electromagnetic circuits of the planet.

I want to pose three kinds of analytic frames here: deep play, the balance between decentralized and centralized control systems, and monological-closed narratives versus dialogical-open ones.

Deep play: Catastrophic events and their associated political con-testations often become deep play, sites where dynamically an increas-ing number of meanincreas-ing structures implode or intersect and where society dramatizes to itself the meaning of its own representations about the moral order. It is said from various rational and cultural (e.g., Cajun backcountry) points of view that controlling the Mis-sissippi in whole or in some of its parts and destroying wetlands along the way is hubristic and self-defeating. Yet, as with many death-defy-ing sports—and some dangerous and death-challengdeath-defy-ing technologies

—the struggle with the Mississippi has also been seen as the grandest of human agons: the Army Corps of Engineers against Nature.

The struggle with the Mississippi is a deep play in the Geertzian sense, giving meaning to endeavors to define human nature against its others. Over-investments of money, passion, and political resources constitute a nexus in which multiple registers of meanings are densely knotted. New Orleans, after all, is the great port of Midwestern agri-culture, a great transshipment port of oil and petroleum, and the cultural entrepôt of French, Cajun, African-American, and southern cultural distinction. But in a Benjaminian flash of catastrophic illumi-nation, the city reveals also the irrationalities of class and racial in-equality, of the ethical or social justice unconcern on the part of politi-cal and financial elites, of bureaucratic fiefdoms, and of technologipoliti-cal decay and miscalculation. The cost-benefit calculations of 1965, for instance, remain unchanged over forty years later. Cost-benefit itself might be challenged as a questionable methodology when lives are at stake. A measure of unconcern might be the token funding in 1998 of

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the plans to save wetlands and rebuild the Louisiana coast, called Coast 2050 or the Louisiana Coastal Area Project. This is a deep play demonstration of meaning and values, dramatized, televised, and for a time put out for public discussion. One might narrate these meanings, as is usually done in the press, as a play of indictments and defenses, in a mock litigious, American shadow play of skeptical civic epistemol-ogy in which truth, fact finding, and meaning are said to be established through adversarial contestation, but in which testimony under oath cannot be subpoenaed or compelled. The existential and ethical deep play agons are refracted as well in plays, music, and the debates about how much aid and succor should be provided by the government and how much by civil society and faith-based organizations.^∞

Balance between decentralized and centralized control or gover-nance systems: this second set of questions about alternative social organizations has become ‘‘mission critical’’: what sorts of centralized or decentralized governance might be most e√ective in dealing with future hurricanes or similar events, including the building and main-taining of sea walls, levees, and wetland defenses, but also the preposi-tioning of emergency supplies, the bolstering of local responders, shel-ters, and evacuation. Benjamin’s question resonates: what use our predictive abilities if the social institutions exacerbate the damage?

The comparative case of the sea wall in the Netherlands built after the devastations of the floods of 1953 has been primarily discussed in technological terms, but an anthropological science and technology approach also should turn attention to the political and organizational robustness required. The floods of 1953 killed almost two thousand people and forced the evacuation of seventy thousand. It could have been much worse. Half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotter-dam, are below sea level. Dramatically, a Dutch sea captain sank his boat in a widening breach to protect Rotterdam. The project to im-prove the sea defenses with a new design that allows water through to maintain the wetlands in at least a portion of the coast caused a huge domestic debate. The new design and debate also shifted the relations between the central state and local water councils. Decentralized wa-ter councils have long been connected to Dutch democratic and self-reliance organizations. Over the course of the twentieth century, the state water control authorities created a symbiotic system of state planning and outsourcing of construction and maintenance to private sector companies. The new e√ort required new organizational forms, both in negotiating the new plans and in the construction and mainte-nance (Bijker 2002). In the end, a compromise in the new design was dictated by the politics of budgets. One leaves Bijker’s account worried

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with the Dutch about how secure the system is, albeit for the moment it seems to be functioning well. The Dutch debate whether one can hold the sea back as the land sinks continues. Perhaps, it is debated, one ought to invest in floating cities, and indeed in places new con-struction is required to be on pontoons. Other experiments for com-parative attention are the floodgates on the Thames, on the Adriatic to protect Venice, the superlevees Japan is building, the concrete shelters on stilts in Bangladesh built in the aftermath of 130,000 deaths from the cyclone and storm surge of 1991, and California’s ‘‘smart’’ levees that use ‘‘time-domain reflectometry’’ sensors to constantly monitor whether the dikes are weakening (Broad 2005: D1).

The loss of life and livelihood in these comparative cases should refo-cus attention on deep play meaning structures embedded in modalities of social organization. An estimated eight hundred to a thousand lives were lost immediately in the Katrina flooding (not considering excess mortality figures in the ensuing years), and almost immediately ques-tions were raised about how many of these were from the poor, dis-abled, and minority communities and about what would happen to these communities and people as the city rebuilt and perhaps in the process gentrified. Kerry Emanuel, one of the scientists studying the connections with climate warming, pointed out that ‘‘tropical depres-sion Jean the previous year—it was just a depresdepres-sion—killed almost 2,000 people in Haiti. Hurricane Mitch in 1999 killed 11,000 people in Central America. And a decade before that, a cyclone in Bangladesh killed 100,000 people’’ (Emanuel 2005).

Emanuel suggests that the United States is relatively lucky in the prevention of loss of life, that people should be encouraged to stop building along vulnerable coastlines, and that the di√erences between the vulnerability of the poor and rich are replicated in international comparative terms as in class terms within New Orleans. Charles Perrow, a sociologist of vulnerabilities in high-risk technologies, ar-gues that New Orleans should be maintained at about one-third its pre-Katrina size, large enough to sustain the vital port functions but small enough to be defended against future storms and sinking coasts with technologies like those used by the Dutch (2007). New Orleans is already two-thirds its pre-Katrina size.

Even more went wrong in the New Orleans case with the break-down of evacuation and relief preparedness. A previous evacuation e√ort in 2004 had resulted in gridlock on the highways. The repeated highway problems in 2005 indicate a certain failure in social learning.

As Katrina approached, newsmen prepared forty-year-later reports on the disaster of Hurricane Betty in 1965, when eighty-one people died, a

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quarter of a million were evacuated, and the Ninth Ward was flooded, people had to be rescued from their rooftops, and rumors flew that water was pumped out of the mayor’s Lake Vista subdivision into the Ninth Ward and even that the Industrial Canal was deliberately breached to flood out black people (Remnick 2005: 48, 53). Worst-case scenarios, with computer generated slosh models, were long in cir-culation (ibid.: 52). One wonders if any of the modelers or hurricane and other first responder agencies had thought much about Perrow’s models of normal accidents (Perrow 1999). Apparently, in 2004 there was a $1-million hurricane simulation exercise in New Orleans that exposed many communication and logistical problems, which, how-ever, remained unfixed (Klein 2005). Speculations began about what the long-term e√ects of the trauma will be on those who will remain separated from their social networks in the Ninth Ward and else-where: whether we will see, for instance, a run of suicides—two sui-cides were reported among the police during the storm.

Reflexive Social Institutions and Dialogic Narrative Capacities:

Thus a third set of questions has to do with the creation of flexible and reflexive social institutions of second-order modernity that can make use of a rich interchange of communications and dialogue between decentralized capillary powers of decision making and central nodes of macrocoordinated support. Despite the multidimensionality of the deep play surrounding a catastrophe, reconstruction, restitution, and rehabilitation planning tend to elicit from government and major re-lief agencies a monological, rather than dialogical, form of mapping complexity within a semiclosed world of expertise that assumes

Thus a third set of questions has to do with the creation of flexible and reflexive social institutions of second-order modernity that can make use of a rich interchange of communications and dialogue between decentralized capillary powers of decision making and central nodes of macrocoordinated support. Despite the multidimensionality of the deep play surrounding a catastrophe, reconstruction, restitution, and rehabilitation planning tend to elicit from government and major re-lief agencies a monological, rather than dialogical, form of mapping complexity within a semiclosed world of expertise that assumes