The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia Marcela A. Fuentes Daniel M. Goldstein . The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Latin America Otherwise Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 274, illustrated. $74.95 (Hb); $21.95 (Pb). In The Spectacular City, Daniel Goldstein explores performance as the locus of community formation, collective identity, and political action. The spectacle, once conceived as one of the main avenues through which nation-states exhibited their power and assigned the populace a fixed zone of spectatorship, is explored here as a mechanism employed by the underprivileged to contest the politics of exclusion. Goldstein centers his study of the role of spectacle in modern societies in the marginal neighborhood of Villa Sebastian Pagador, located on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, home to migrants mostly from the rural region of Oruro. Traditionally known as the locale of the annual folkloric festival of San Miguel, a fiesta modeled after the internationally famous Carnaval de Oruro, Villa Sebastian Pagador has lately gained public notoriety for the attempted lynching of suspected thieves. By looking at performance as political action, The Spectacular City intervenes in current scholarship focused on the socio-economic crisis brought about by the application of neoliberal policies to Latin America and on the many collective actions that were born following the withdrawal of the state. The book's main goal is to explore what lies behind the notion of making justice with one's own hands, given the authorities' failure to provide the people with security and legal justice. Goldstein situates the extreme performance of vigilante lynching within a context of social injustice and collective identity, in which spectacular performance operates as a viable mechanism for the dispossessed to gain access to the public eye. In the introduction, "Becoming Visible in Neoliberal Bolivia," Goldstein presents the Fiesta de San Miguel and vigilante lynching as "appropriations of cultural or legal domains typically designated as arenas of state control" (4). He states that exploring these two events as performance allows him to get to the "underlying political logic" that they share in the context of exclusionary politics. In this chapter, Goldstein gives an account of the instrumental role of urban design in bringing about this logic of unequal citizenship and of the spectacle in activating space for expressions of national belonging to be carried out by a different agent: the people. Goldstein's take on the spectacular society implies a reading of violence "not just as a symptom of the failure [of the state] but a spectacular response to it" (21). According to Goldstein, largescale performance enables certain groups to pose as public, a "popular public" to whom the authorities are accountable. In chapter one, "Ethnography, Governmentality, and Urban Life," Goldstein scrutinizes the practice of ethnography in relation to the politics of representation, an issue that has repeatedly presented a challenge for contemporary [End Page 859] anthropology. He shows how, in a context of heightened tension and distrust, the Pagadoreños get involved in projects of community self-representation, simultaneously performing for and hiding from the external gaze. Chapter two, "Urbanism, Modernity, and Migration in Cochabamba, " provides an overview of municipal policies through which "illegal squatters are remade as citizens, transformed through the land legalization process into landowners and taxpayers" (89). Within the context of neoliberalism, in which the duties of the state in relation to its citizens are radically reduced, this chapter shows how those in power still impose their sovereignty, operating at a micro-political, bureaucratic level. Chapter three, "Villa Sebastian Pagador and the Politics of Community," tells the story from a different standpoint, that of the Pagadoreños. Following the idea of "spectacular genealogy," Goldstein looks at the historical unfolding of Villa Sebastian Pagador's public life, "in which long periods of conflict and consensus building […] are punctuated by moments of elaborate, choreographed public display" (93).The author exposes the process through which the Pagadoreños came to understand that, in order to get the attention of the authorities, they had to show themselves as a strong collective presence, infused by the symbolic capital that belonged to them as Orureños. 1 In chapter four, "Performing National...