In this section, I argue that the sense of personal transformation and informational privilege which counters experienced led them to interpret the conflict in more critical ways. This was important in solidifying their political commitment as it led to new interpretations of who could be considered ‘guilty’ of crimes, and where responsibility for the violence lay. Such sentiments could give a new sense of having a responsibility to act, and further altered the ways in which they thought about the nation.
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observing my work with Menos Días Aquí for a number of months, he told me that he would like to count for the project. He did so, and I asked him how he felt about the experience. Despite the fact that he was already familiar with the history of the conflict, he talked about how counting had allowed him to: “understand that the situation is much more difficult than I thought”. He argued that it allowed him to see “the extent of dehumanisation which has occurred”. When I asked him if he could explain further, he told me that:
“There are little details which make you say it’s a total massacre. I’m convinced that everyone who says that the situation is bad but not that bad, well they just aren’t informed. If you make yourself read the papers for a whole week, if you make yourself read the reports from organisations like Human Rights Watch, like Amnesty International, if you make yourself read reports, testimonies, if you go into YouTube and see videos of shoot-outs in secondary schools, even in nurseries, the people hanged from bridges, the beheaded, well I mean you have to ask, what is happening? I think that precisely by counting, it makes you aware of what Mexico today actually is - a laboratory of dehumanisation, an authentic butchery, which has an underlying socio-economic context and a backdrop of disastrous values. I would tell all Mexicans to count for one week and I’m sure that millions of people who right now won’t wake up - not even with a fucking whipping - would open their eyes and they would realise the true extent of this country’s reality”.
His response mirrored that which Alex had told me months earlier – that it was only by counting, and reading about what was happening in-depth, that someone could really claim to ‘know’ what was going on. Luis attributed counting with the ability to politicise people who otherwise “won’t wake up – not even with a fucking whipping.” Like other counters, the experience had revealed a social reality which meant that “you have to ask what is happening.” This suggests that his previous assumptions about what was happening in Mexico had been drastically ruptured. Encountering information about the violence was not enough: such information led to questions
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about why such events were happening, and served to highlight the lack of alternative information which was available in respect to those underlying causes. He associates counting with having the potential to reveal ‘the truth’ about Mexico: it reveals “the true extent of this country’s reality”. The process of counting and the (rupturing) potential for learning become heavily intertwined here.
The experience of counting also led Fabiola and Javier to question the state of impunity in Mexico. During our interview, Javier explained that:
“There are things that you only see when counting that make you say shit, like the geographies of death, like there’s a fucking motorway where they always go to dump bodies, and it’s like, what the fuck? What are the police doing? If you know that they dump the bodies there, you don’t exactly have to be a genius to stop it”.
Here, then, the patterns he has observed whilst counting have actually led him to question the state’s tactics. It brings the police under suspicion and brings into sharp focus the idea that they may in some way be implicated with the violence. It forces him to question the power structures within the country. Fabiola agreed with him, and added:
“I thought that too. Like if we, just normal people, can count and realise those things….it’s like, you realise how much corruption there is. It’s ridiculous.”
Here, then, it is the ‘normal’ people who are faced with the truth about what is happening. More specifically, it is ‘normal people’ who have counted. They take on the critical knowledge provided by the experiencing of counting. This knowledge imbues the count with the ability to surpass official versions of events, and observe the realities underneath. As such, it brings the institutions of the state under the critical gaze of “normal” people. Javier observed:
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“All the crap just becomes more visible through doing it, you see the system.”
This idea of being able to “see the system” was an important one for counters. It gave the impression of a curtain having been lifted, and of being faced with that which they were unable to see clearly before counting. It is transformative knowledge because it shifts the loci of guilt for the violence and social inequality in general. It also changed the way volunteers viewed the victims. Fabiola, for example, confided that:
“I always thought that in general those that were dying were involved with organised crime, but then when you count and you see that there are children, or fifteen year old kids which could be in basically any classroom, it’s a good way of being able to lift the lid on Mexico and see what’s really happening”.
Here, she is implying that her understanding of the conflict changed as a result of counting. It was a way to “lift the lid on Mexico”, and to see things which others were unable to see. It also changed the way she understood the culpability of victims – she no longer viewed them as all belonging to organised crime, and instead saw them as young people who could “be in any classroom”. This has particular cosmopolitan implications: the way she understands the nation has shifted in such a way that she now questions the culpability of those the media and the state attribute with the responsibility for the violence. There is now a new kind of other within Mexico with whom she feels connected: the victims of the violence. Such a sentiment also became apparent in Luis’ description of counting:
“Few things annoy me more than seeing those who justify the deaths of so many people in this war
by saying that most of them are criminals. Even the capo of the most dangerous cartel is a Mexican just like me; he is someone who is part of my country who in some moment had to make that
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decision. It might be that he is an arsehole with no soul, who can mutilate, decapitate, rape and torture, but at the same time, he is also a victim. That person has such a grade of insensibility and hate due to his own marginalisation, lack of education and the environment without values in which he has grown up. He is also a product of social marginalisation which has terrible effects.”
Hence, not only did the count result in new understandings of the conflict in Mexico, it also changed the way criminality and victimhood could be understood – and where blame was attributed. This signifies a transformation in the kind of cosmopolitanism inhabited by counters: it changes the way different kinds of others within Mexico are viewed. These are cosmopolitan shifts which in themselves are politicised: the ‘real’ culprits, and the ‘real’ victims, have shifted position within individual imaginaries in such a way that power inequalities within Mexico are revealed.
Robbins argues that after the critiques levelled against anthropology in the post-Writing Cultures era, “it has often been the suffering subject who has replaced the savage one as a privileged object of our attention” (2013: 450). He claims that “it was only when trauma became universal, when it came to define a humanity without borders, that anthropologists found a foundation for their science that allowed them to dispense with the notion of the other completely” (2013: 455). This was anthropology based on the notion that “trauma was indeed becoming the bridge between cultures” (2013: 453), and that traumatic suffering was something “beyond culture”. In this way, it did not “require cultural interpretation in order to render them sensible” (2013: 455)., Robbins argues that this is an approach to ethnography “in which we do not primarily provide cultural context so as to offer lessons in how lives are lived differently elsewhere, but in which we offer accounts of trauma that make us and our readers feel in our bones the vulnerability we as human beings all share” (2013: 455). Whilst Robbins offers these insights as a commentary on the current state of anthropology, his discussion resonates ethnographically with the processes I have described in this chapter. In the same way that some anthropologists have treated suffering as something “beyond culture” and which links people together “as humans”, it was also treated as
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such by those counting the dead. Like Throop argues, “while our various modes of being with others are clearly patterned by personal, interpersonal, and cultural assumptions concerning the regulation and control of empathy and empathic-like attunements, empathy itself at times escapes the limits of our personal, interpersonal, and cultural emplacement, spilling over, even if fleetingly, to new horizons of intersubjective understanding” (2010: 773). It was through such connections that counters were able to empathise with the experiences of victims whose lives may, in multiple ways, have been completely alien to them. Such a projected inhabitation of another ‘self’ allowed for an opening towards those ‘others’. This could lead to a critique of the root causes of the violence in the country, as well as an acknowledgement that one must look beyond immediate assertions of guilt and responsibility. At the same time, the ability to inhabit strong emotions as a means of crossing social divides fits with a particularly Mexican trope of social revolution which simultaneously adds a specific cultural coherency to the emotionality of activists’ narratives (Noble 2013). They at once transcend, and yet dwell within, particular localised tropes of political action.
Their empathetic, embodied knowledge, then, was not to be divorced from its political causes (French 1994; Jenkins and Valiente 1994; Turner 1994). By recognising the political nature of the causes of the deaths they counted, counters experienced their informational privilege as creating a moral obligation to act. The victims with whom the counters empathised were people who had suffered as a result of violence and conflict. The way counters came to know and relate to the dead was also a result of the context in which they were placed. Their bodily knowledge was an outcome and symptom of the violence (and its multiple contemporary and historical causes). It was also a critique of such processes via the uses to which such bodily knowledge was put, and the very context in which it was experienced i.e. counting and peace activism. As such, the mutual implication of engagement and detachment during the activist experience became integral to the completion of the activist project itself. It also became a solidifying element to the politicisation of individual volunteers.
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