Como agua para chocolate and the Question of Viable Alternatives to Technologies of Domination
[In the following essay, Hoeg studies the importance of the “gringo” scientist, Dr. John Brown, in Como agua para chocolate.]
In Becoming a Scientist in Mexico: The Challenge of Creating a Scientific Community in an Underdeveloped Country, Jacqueline Fortes and Larissa Adler Lomnitz paint a rather gloomy picture of the possibility of developing a ‘critical scientific mass’ in Mexico or, indeed, in any Latin American country. The specific reasons given are many, but essentially the problem revolves around a negative cultural perception of the scientific ethos, since “science did not result from internal development; it is an imported cultural product” (161). This view is echoed in a whole host of recent studies (Hernández-Boada; Martinez; Peritore; Sutz). The consensus seems to be that the most Latin America can aspire to in terms of Research Science is the construction of local appropriate technologies, and even these are suspect (Peña).1 Thus, in spite of a few isolated success stories such as Cuba’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, from the perspective of the scientific community Latin America’s continued scientific and technological dependence, and hence continued vulnerability to exploitation by transnationals and others, would appear to be a foregone conclusion.
If this is indeed the case, it does not bode well for those Latin Americans who would prefer to mold their own futures. If we accept that technology plays an ever increasing role in shaping our lives, then it follows that to lose control over both the production of technology and technological production is to lose control over nearly all areas of human relations, from work and leisure to society, politics and culture. The question concerning who controls technology is central to determining who we are. One must ask, then, apart from the scientific literature, where else does society forge its relation to technology, and why is this question not central to cultural studies?
Regarding the second part of the above question, a partial explanation for the relative lack of interest in technology shown by cultural studies, apart from the traditional rift between the “two cultures,” appears to lie in the transparency of technology. This very essay will be written, spell-checked, e-mailed, printed, and distributed by technological means, all from the controlled (climate and otherwise) environment of my office. But unless something malfunctions, I will be oblivious to the technology which surrounds me, it has become ‘second nature’ to me. Indeed, so pervasive is the influence of technology that there are those, Jean Baudrillard among them, who would have it that first nature no longer exists, that we now inhabit a world of simulacra and will soon occupy the virtual reality of cyberspace.2
Once this transparency is recognized, the extent of the socio-cultural impact of technology begins to acquire a sharper focus. One area of popular culture in which the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of techno-social relations is reviewed and debated is the field of literature. In fact, Latin American literature has a longstanding relationship with the discourses of science and technology, from the nineteenth-century influences of positivism and the natural sciences, through the early twentieth-century preoccupation with the social sciences, especially anthropology and ethnography, and on to such contemporary narratives as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus, and Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (Robinett). One public forum, then, in which to express an awareness of and a reaction to the evergrowing control exerted by technology is provided by literature (and cinema), a forum in which popular beliefs can be symbolized and constructed, and the dominant discourse of science contested.
From this, at least two questions follow: what are the popular beliefs expressed in narrative (and film), and what do they portend for future relations between science, technology, and society? Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this essay to consider these questions from a broad enough perspective to account for all the varying takes on technology represented in even the few novels mentioned above. Therefore, in this essay I wish to concentrate on one issue, the depiction of the Gringo Scientist in Como agua para chocolate: Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros.3 The recurrent motif of the Gringo Scientist represents one strand in the socio-cultural process of weaving popular attitudes towards foreign technology in developing countries, and so participates in both mirroring and constructing popular sentiment toward technology in Latin America. The novel and the subsequent film are worthy of examination in as much as they have enjoyed wide distribution both in Spanish and in translation, and so can reasonably be assumed to have substantially influenced popular opinion.
In Como agua para chocolate, we first see the gringo scientist Doctor John Brown when he arrives to care for Rosaura. Dr. Brown is a medical doctor, and has been summoned from his home in Eagle Pass, Texas, to assist in the delivery of Rosaura and Pedro’s first child, later named Roberto. Because Rosaura’s husband Pedro, who is sent to fetch the Doctor, is detained by government troops, Dr. Brown does not arrive in time and the novel’s protagonist Tita finds herself alone with her sister Rosaura at the crucial moment. Suddenly aware of her own lack of knowledge in these matters, she curses her schoolteachers and her mother alike for not having prepared her for the task of delivery, and calls upon the former household cook and wetnurse to Tita, the now deceased Nacha for help (78). In what would appear to be a manifestation of the supernatural, Nacha hears her prayers and comes to her aid: “Después, siguiendo las instrucciones que Nacha le daba al oído, supo perfectamente todos los pasos que tenía que seguir: cortar el ombligo en el lugar y momento preciso …” (79). When Doctor Brown arrives the following day, the true extent of the miracle is scientifically confirmed, right down to the Latinate technical terminology: “Según el doctor, Rosaura sufrió un ataque de eclampsia que la pudo haber matado. Se mostró muy sorprendido de que Tita la hubiera asistido con tanto aplomo y decisión en condiciones tan poco favorables” (80).
That a gringo doctor is sent for, indeed he is the family physician, rather than a Mexican obstetrician, indicates the prestige enjoyed by North American science and scientists and the lack of faith in local practitioners in Mexico. This reflects the contemporary view of medicine in Mexico, where nearly everyone who can afford it travels to the United States for medical care, and the local government-sponsored program of medical care, Seguro Social, is considered suspect at best. In the realm of medical techno-scientific knowledge, then, it would appear that Mexican popular opinion cedes the field to North American expertise.
However, Tita’s success, which is due not to knowledge she received from the government-sponsored school system or from her mother, but rather from the scientifically inexplicable manifestation of Nacha, appears to contest the view that privileges foreign science and technology over local knowledge or traditional folkways and home remedies (the remedios caseros of the title). The school system can be read as a metaphor of the foreign (French) positivist science of the Porfiriato period immediately preceding the Revolution, while her mother is effectively a symbol of patriarchal participation in the dominant, rational, epistemological discourse, in as much as she sent for Brown in the first place, and consistently refuses to accept supernatural explanations for anything until the final moments of the novel, when she herself ironically becomes a supernatural apparition. In contrast, Nacha represents nature, emotion, intuition, artesanal technics such as cooking, local or indigenous knowledge, and the cryptic “muchas otras cosas” (14). The implication is that Nacha, who is either mestiza or india, has access to another, more authentic type of knowledge, an ‘original’ knowledge that was once known to all of humanity, but which has since been lost in the ‘fall’ into scientific knowledge and the concomitant rush to construct our modern techno-scientific worldview.
As Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out in Myth and Archive, the privledging of mythical knowledge is characteristic of Latin American narrative in the first half of the twentieth century, beginning in the period following World War I, when this type of originary knowledge was seen as a point of departure from which to begin again to reconstruct a world shattered by war on a global scale. In this ear of the Decline of the West and the demise of positivism, Latin American literature took on an anthropological mediation.4 The mediation of the discourse of structural anthropology, ethnography, and certain artistic avant-garde movements such as surrealism produced a generally apocalyptic view that placed Western techno-scientific culture in opposition to an ‘authentic’ relation with ourselves and with nature, and viewed it as part and parcel of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation.
In the case of the anthropologically mediated novels González Echevarría refers to, such as Miguel Angel Asturias’ Leyendas de Guatemala, Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos, this turn in Latin American literature was in reaction to the failure of the previous mediation provided by the hegemonic discourse of the natural sciences, which followed the model of the scientific travelers and travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them Alexander von Humboldt, Charles-Marie de la Condamine, and Charles Darwin. Examples of the influence of these scientific travelers and travelogues include such novels as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo, Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s Francisco, and Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertôes. In these positivist novels the uniqueness of the New World is reported and then interpreted by a scientific observer whose objective ‘method’ qualifies him to read nature and so reveal its truth.
However, in the case of Como agua, although the novel is set during the period of the Mexican Revolution with all its accompanying destruction and hence proof of the counter-finality of the positivist project in Mexico, it was written in the late 1980s, a period of hegemony not of the natural sciences but rather of the communications sciences. Therefore, one must ask, is the appropriation of anthropological discourse as a discourse of resistance fitting or anachronistic, is it, in the words of Claudine Potvin, “postmodern parody or simply cliche?”5 One might argue that from within the historical context of the novel it is eminently appropriate, but if we are considering the question from within the context of the construction of contemporary popular opinion vis à vis the relations between society and technology in Latin America, it would appear that contrasting timeless local or indigenous knowledge with a dated positivist scientific paradigm might well be an exercise in futility. In the intervening period, anthropological mediation itself has suffered a crise de conscience involving the revelation of its literary nature (Clifford 22), and this has created a subsequent metadiscourse within the social sciences and within Latin American narrative (Rayuela, Yo el supremo).6 Also, in the final decades of the twentieth century the unveiling of the social roots of the supposedly ‘value-free’ natural sciences has produced a crisis and a new metadiscourse within this field also.7 Finally, the objective scientific observer of positivism has given way to the anonymous technocrat of the panoptic communicational apparatus. Given these developments, the question must necessarily arise, has Esquivel simply resuscitated the discourses of anthropology and positivism for one more flogging, or is there another way to interpret the relation between Tita, the gringo scientist, and Rosaura’s childbirth?
In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Anne McClintock devotes considerable effort to demonstrating the relation between imperialism, colonization, and the image of the female body. Discussing Jan van der Straet’s famous drawing (ca. 1575) of the “discovery” of America, in which “A fully armored Vespucci stands erect and masterful before a naked and erotically inviting woman, who inclines toward him from a hammock” (25–26), McClintock argues that the female figure—America—represents “nature’s invitation to conquest … while Vespucci confronts the virgin land with the patrimony of scientific mastery and imperial might. … and stakes male Europe’s territorial rights to her body and, by extension, the fruits of her land” (26). Relatedly, Paula A Treichler, in “Feminism, Medicine, and the Meaning of Childbirth,” discusses the birth of “modern obstetrics” in the nineteenth century and the concomitant control over childbirth achieved and since maintained by the dominant techno-scientific medical culture. For Treichler, the definition of childbirth as a medical event, “a potentially diseased condition that routinely requires the arts of medicine to overcome the processes of nature” (119, italics in original) opens the door to male, scientific, imperial control of the female body. From the point of view of medical science, the body is seen as a production factory, “with physicians the technicians who keep it running efficiently and profitably” (121). Treichler goes on to review some of the voices that have arisen from within feminism to contest this domination, concluding with that of the novelist Margaret Atwood who, in Surfacing, equates medicalized childbirth with U.S. imperialism. The model developed by McClintok and Treichler demonstrates the genderized nature of the phenomenon described by Max Weber whereby the post hoc rationalization of domination, reason, turns from controlling nature to controlling humanity.8
Can we then suggest as a possible reading of Tita’s performance in Rosaura’s childbirth that of an antiimperialist, anticolonialist analogy of the relations of colonizing Gringo Scientist and colonized Woman/Nature? Does Tita’s success represent a discourse of resistance in opposition to colonizing Gringo Science? At first glance, the answer might well be in the affirmative, for clearly the discourse of techno-imperialism has been a gendered discourse of power in which that defined as female has been passively victimized. However, if the parable of Tita’s successful rejection of foreign science and technology is to provide a useful contribution to the construction of a successful alternative relation to technology in Latin America, it must be based upon a viable worldview and not complicit in reproducing the idealization and manipulation of “the (super)natural.”
Rosaura’s childbirth is not completely natural but rather requires intervention. This successful intervention is based on another knowledge system, one not susceptible to rational demonstration, which, in the novel, proves itself at least as effective as techno-science. Thus, in pragmatic terms the two systems are equally effective, while local or indigenous knowledge has the added benefit of escaping from the exploitative imperial control of modern medical science and the male, imperial, domination of instrumental reason. But Tita’s success rests on the slippery slope of Nacha’s more ‘authentic’ mythical knowledge. It is therefore necessary to consider some of the other factors involved in the construction of Nacha’s knowledge.
Many recent social studies of science have demonstrated the constructed nature of modern scientific discourse (Latour and Woolgar; Bleier; Harding; Haraway; Rose; Wood). These studies have recognized that supposedly objective science and its method are in fact textual constructs of society, in much the same way as literature, history, and politics are products of their social milieu, and so subject to the same biases and constraints as any other social commodity. On this view, the scientific worldview that was supposed to emancipate humanity from myth and superstition turns out to be a mythical construct itself. Gianni Vattimo summarizes these developments as follows:
Consequently, the idea that the course of history could be thought of as enlightenment, as the liberation of reason from the shadows of mythical knowledge, has lost its legitimacy. Demythologization has itself come to be seen as myth.
(39)
But even if we fully accept this strong programme in the sociology of knowledge, does it follow that the previous myths are suddenly relegitimized? If, as Nietzsche pointed out, all truth is ‘error’ in as much as it is founded on the relative exigencies of our social context and not on transcendent values (if God is dead), are there no criteria for choosing provisional values? In the case of the construction of popular opinion regarding technology in Latin America, I would argue that those values are most useful which promote long-term survival and well-being of the individuals and societies impacted by technology. In order to determine whether or not Nacha’s alternative epistemology offers a viable antidote to the foreign, male, rational technoscience represented by the gringo scientist in Como agua, we need first elucidate other aspects of the alternative worldview constructed in the novel.
During Brown’s evaluation of Tita’s expertise in the delivery of Rosaura’s child, the doctor notices a curious and alien perception insinuating itself into his body even as he concentrates on his rational appraisal of the medical situation: “Un hormiguero le recorría todo el cuerpo, despertando y activando sus dormidos sentidos” (80). What is happening, of course, is that the emotions of the cold, rational man of science have been awakened by the presence of Tita.
In fact, a leitmotif of the novel is Tita’s ability to elicit emotional responses in others. This mystical power is revealed in many ways, including the effect she has on Brown and Pedro, but primarily in her cooking. Her culinary creations are works of art that illicit uniform emotional responses in those who taste the food she prepares. These responses are a direct reflection of Tita’s emotional state at the time she prepares the meals. There is often a cause and effect relation between Tita’s emotional state during the food preparation, certain of her bodily fluids which serve as vectors, and the emotional response engendered in the receptors of her culinary messages. If, for example, her tears fall in the food during preparation, the meal produces a melancholy response, while if her blood is introduced, an aphrodisiac effect ensues, and so on. Thus, mind and body are linked alchemically, in contrast to the prevailing ratio-scientific mind/body dualism. Since Tita was taught to cook by Nacha, in fact she was practically raised by Nacha in the kitchen, Tita’s cooking can be construed as an extension of an indigenous artesanal tradition, as part of the traditional knowledge and techniques of a timeless society in which mind and body were never separated, in which emotion was never subordinated to reason.
In the novel, this more authentic form of knowledge, represented by Tita/Nacha/Luz del amanecer’s prehispanic culinary technique, is contrasted with North American cooking, and hence by analogy with the distortions and the sensual and emotional impoverishment of techno-scientific civilization. When Tita finally rebels against her mother, the tyrannical Mamá Elena, she suffers an emotional trauma and is pronounced insane by Mamá Elena, who orders Dr. Brown to commit Tita to an asylum. Brown instead brings her to his home in Texas, where she eventually recovers. When she first arrives, her meals are prepared and brought to her by Caty, “una señora norteamericana de 70 años” (114). But in spite of her vital need for sustenance at this critical juncture in her recovery, she finds the North American food so banal and tasteless as to be inedible: “A veces Tita ni siquiera probaba la comida, era una comida insípida que le desagradaba” (114). The food of the culture of reason is so lacking in the spice of emotion that Tita prefers death to culinary dishonor. Indeed, throughout the novel the representatives of masculine, ratio/military repression—Mamá Elena, sergeant Treviño, Gertrudis, Caty—are shown to be incompetent in the emotional art of cooking, thus reinforcing the artist/scientist binary.
Fortunately, before a fate worse than everything short of eating North American cuisine can overtake her, Tita catches a whiff of smoke coming from the margins of Brown’s techno-scientific complex and she is saved, transported back to an earlier, more authentic time:
Provenía de un pequeño cuarto al fondo del patio. Una fumarola desperdigaba por el ambiente un olor tan agradable y a la vez tan familiar que la hizo abrir la ventana para poder inhalarlo profundamente. Con sus ojos cerrados se vio sentada junto a Nacha en el piso de la cocina mientras hacían tortillas de maíz: vio la olla donde se cocinaba un puchero de lo más aromático, junto a él los frijoles soltaban el primer hervor … sin dudarlo decidió ir a investigar quién cocinaba. No podía tratarse de Caty. La persona que producía ese tipo de olor con la comida sí sabía cocinar.
(115)
The cook, “muy parecida a Nacha,” turns out to be Brown’s grandmother, whose amerindian name translates to Spanish as Luz del amanecer. She is a Native American, possibly of the tribe known as the Kickapoo in English-speaking North America, who was abducted by Brown’s grandfather and subsequently married to him, much to the dismay of his family. Luz was ostracized by the family and relegated to a small room at the edge of the gringo social space, where she happily continued her non-scientific investigations into the curative properties of local plants. Luz’s indigenous cooking knowledge saves Tita’s life, and so demonstrates the superiority of her more authentic worldview. Because Luz is also a curandera, a connection is established between the curative powers of indigenous cooking and these same curative powers, and hence superiority, of holistic, indigenous approaches to the areas considered the preserve of Western science, such as botany, biology and medicine. Thus, the critique of Western rationality passes from the artistic arena to the scientific.
Constructing a parallel with recent scientific admissions of the medicinal values of indigenous, herbal, healing techniques, the narrator speaks of “la gran diferencia de opiniones y conceptos que existían entre estos representantes de dos culturas tan diferentes” (116) (science and literature?) and we learn that it is only with the failure of “los mejores conocimientos científicos” to save the life of Brown’s greatgrandfather that the family is forced to recognize the wisdom of “la kikapú” in the dramatic moment in which she steps in and saves his life, “cantándole melodías extrañas y poniéndole cataplasmas de hierbas entre los humos del incienso y copal” (117). In microcosm, we witness the simultaneous destruction of one myth concerning control over nature and its replacement with another. “A partir de ese día «la kikapú» se convirtió en el médico de la familia y fue plenamente reconocida como curandera milagrosa entre la comunidad norteamericana” (118).
John Brown’s scientific career also reflects the evolution of Western science with respect to indigenous knowledge. Much as modern science began with alchemy, broke with it to legitimize itself through rational method, and has recently returned to examine non-Western science through the lens of method, John spends his youth at Luz’s side in the “pequeño laboratorio,” goes to the university where he learns to repudiate ‘primitive’ superstition, “las teorías modernas … se contraponían enormamente con las de su abuela” (118), and finally returns home to “compropar científicamente todas las curaciones milagrosas que «Luz del amanecer» había realizado” (118). But even as he accepts the efficacy of Luz’s practices, he maintains his rational, objective approach to medicine, “Sin ningún problema disociaba la actividad mental de la física” (118). He remains in a world in which mind and body are separated. He still doesn’t get it, and his failure to understand the non-rational costs him his chance for true happiness, defined as emotional fulfillment with Tita. Thus, even as gringo rationality attempts to approach its ‘opposite’—emotion—the effort is doomed from the start due to the rational context in which reason must necessarily operate. The two cultures are inevitably mutually exclusive and, much as Caty cannot duplicate Luz’s cooking, John and Western science can neither comprehend nor equal Luz’s knowledge of nature.
The theme of incomplete, gringo reason versus holistic, indigenous emotion is also illustrated through the relations between Tita, John, and Pedro. Throughout the novel Tita has been forced to sublimate her emotions due to the repression of the patriarchal Mamá Elena, who forbids her to marry Pedro in order that Tita might care for her in her old age. Pedro has a chance to seize the emotional day, to let passion rule and change the course of history, but he fails because he cannot bring himself to challenge the established rational order, “Si Pedro le hubiera pedido a Tita huir con él, ella no lo hubiera pensado ni tantito, pero no lo hizo” (60). Instead, he makes the more ‘reasonable’ move of marrying Rosaura in order to be close to Tita. Thus, the one rational decision that Pedro makes in the entire novel costs him his chance for emotional fulfillment.
After John saves Tita by curing her hysteria, a ‘female’ mental illness, she feels indebted to him and so agrees to marry him. Besides, she calculates that life with John will bring her a sort of measured serenity, a cool happiness, and so the marriage seems quite logical and reasonable. However, in the end she cannot surrender to the voice of reason and the heat of passion carries the day, “Pedro rozaba tiernamente su mejilla con la de Tita, y ella sentía que la mano de Pedro en su cintura la quemaba como nunca” (236). She rejects “John, la paz, la serenidad, la razón” (176), in favor of the hot-blooded Pedro.
When Rosaura finally dies, Tita and Pedro are at last free, “Por primera vez en la vida podían amarse libremente” (241). In the final scene with Pedro, Tita, in a chile-induced epiphany, realizes she should not have wasted her life letting her emotions be controlled by reason just as “un climax amoroso partieron juntos hacia el edén perdido” (244). Tita at last releases her long-repressed emotions, an event which sparks a purifying conflagration which destroys Tita, Pedro, and the ranch, a sacrificial atonement for the original sin of reason which returns the ranch to its pristine edenic purity, “convirtiendo ese terreno en el más fértil de la región” (244). The lesson is clear, when a culture is forced by reason to sublimate its emotional life, sooner or later it must encounter an apocalyptic final moment, a cataclysmic and purging return of the repressed.
In this edenic narrative the demonized gringo scientist is rejected, and so by analogy the ‘masculine’ values of Western technoscience and instrumental reason, and the purity of the prelapsarian garden is restored. The malestar in the rancho—cold, repressive rationality—becomes a metaphor for the malestar en la cultura in Latin America.9 In the either/or world of the novel, the two value systems, gringo reason and indigenous emotion, are posited as mutually exclusive binary oppositions. The director of the film version of Como agua, Esquivel’s husband Alfonso Arau, explains his cinematic vision of the relation between these two ‘opposing’ discourses: “In this movie, the male mentality is identified with the Mexican revolution and the mother, even though she’s female. The heroine, Tita, and the maid Nacha represent intuition, passion, sentiment associated with the female mentality. And this film was about the superiority of intuition over reason. I am saying the brain is a very limited device. It’s a very sophisticated computer, but intuition gets you in touch with the universe” (Elias).10
Arau’s cybernetic metaphor not withstanding, his description of the binary metaphysics of Como agua para chocolate is fairly accurate. Woman’s Magic, representing intuition, indigenous knowledge, and emotion is opposed to gringo Man’s rational science and technology, with predictably apocalyptic results. The antidote to modern civilization is perceived as a return to an imaginary Edenic perfection before the fall into rational scientific knowledge, that is, as a return to origins and a more ‘authentic’ mythical knowledge.
But how effective, in terms of the establishment of viable options to current relations between society and technologies of domination in Latin America, is the alternative worldview developed in Como agua? Certainly, many of the ideas in the novel—the value of local knowledge and appropriate technologies, the domination of one-dimensional technoscience—are valid critiques of Latin America’s relations with science and technology. But the question remains, is a valid alternative offered, and here some doubts need be expressed. In the first place, the outlook proffered in the novel simply reverses the idealization of progress into its opposite, the idealization of a mythical past. This perspective assumes humanity can return to a ‘traditional’ way of life and this time not commit the same errors that brought it to its present impasse, the ratio-technological world of capitalist exploitation. This vision of a return to nature fails to realize that technology is part of human nature. Luz del amanecer’s investigations employ technology, and represent the alchemical origins that eventually led to modern science. It is through technology that humanity realizes any project beyond mere existence, and there has never been a human society that has opted for mere existence. As Ortega y Gasset points out, humanity does not require simple existence or estar, but rather bienestar.
… vida significa para él [el hombre] no simple estar, sino bienestar. … El bienestar y no el estar es la necesidad fundamental para el hombre, la necesidad de necesidades.
(Meditación de la técnica 328)
Another problem with the type of knowledge represented by the medical interventions of Nacha and Luz is the fact that it cannot be called into account by objective science. Thus it represents the same type of knowledge claims which occasioned the development of modern science. It represents an arbitrary and highly subjective authority that must be taken on faith, precisely the type of myth from which reason was supposed to emancipate humanity. Is the fact that the dialectic of enlightenment has produced a non-emancipating version of objectivity sufficient reason to abandon the concept of objectivity, or proof of the need to construct another type of objectivity?
In line with this, it should be observed that an edenic, antiscience metaphysics lends itself both to right-wing calls for a return to traditional values and a reactionary utopian criticism of techno-scientific civilization, since with the rejection of the idea of progress these utopias can only be located in a nostalgic past, one of ‘traditional’ values. As to what these traditional values represent, one may note with trepidation that the binary polarizations in Como agua involve the ominous categories of race, gender, and nationality.
Another difficulty with this view, given its propensity for nostalgic idealization of a mythical past, is that it cannot adequately deal with the question of humanity’s historical horizon. Since technology is an integral part of the past, present, and future of humanity, any representation of that past, present, and future that cannot satisfactorily deal with technology is necessarily reductionist and so incapable of competently representing contemporary society and culture. Additionally, the construction of an idealized past is itself a product of our present techno-social context, a fact which makes said idealized past part and parcel of the ratio-scientific present it seeks to reject. This objection harkens back to the crise de conscience in anthropology described by Clifford and others, especially Derrida in his well-known critique (101–40) of Lévi-Strauss’ “A Writing Lesson” (294–304).
Finally, the idealization of an unchanging past fails to come to grips with the central problem of Latin America’s relation with technology, that of defining an appropriate relation with technologies of empowerment and liberation while simultaneously deconstructing existing relations with technologies of domination, all of this from within the context of a hot society, that is, in a society that is irretrievable thrown into the hot information relations of a society of mass communication. This problem derives from the fact that the only available models of long-term sustainable relations with technology are found in cool societies (Rappaport; Sanday). The examples of the integration of Being and beings taken from cool societies exhibit the paradigmatic forms to which the myths of a return to origins aspire. An essential difference between these and modern, hot, societies is in their respective forms of information retrieval and exchange, a difference based on technology. Hot societies do not require weeks or months of feasting, dancing and so forth to ‘print out’ their stored information. Therefore, information age societies don’t protect themselves against new information as do traditional societies, but rather incorporate it at exponentially increasing rates. In the information age, social change is a structural component of the system. A societal model which does not account for continual change cannot offer a feasible alternative to the present sway of technologies of domination.
Therefore, in terms of providing a viable vision for the establishment of long-term sustainable relations between technologies of empowerment, society, and nature in Latin America, one must conclude that a model based on imaginary opposition to the stereotype of the Gringo Scientist exemplified in Como agua para chocolate is not only counterproductive, but dangerously reactionary in its ominous racist, sexist, and nationalist overtones. Furthermore, as Antonio Marquet has demonstrated (59–62), the familial relations depicted in the novel are a version of the Oedipal narrative and kinship relations theorized by Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and so reproduce existing patterns of competition and dominance.
Whether or not one believes that literature should serve a social purpose, the simple fact is that novels such as Como agua, and their subsequent cinematic incarnations, do have an enormous impact on popular beliefs and attitudes, due in large part to technologies of mass diffusion. I would argue that it behooves us to pay particular attention to popular images of technology produced, marketed, and disseminated from within the technoproductivist apparatus lest the commodification of ineffectual critiques of technology comes to serve the dual purpose of perpetuating and reinforcing the current rein of technologies of domination.
This essay began with Fortes and Lomnitz’s assertion that in Latin America “science did not result from internal development; it is an imported cultural product.” This assertion simply perpetuates the myth of idealized origins, of the way it never was. The truth of the matter is, from the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztec to Perón and Castro, domination in Latin America has always been achieved through science and technology. The challenge is not one of “creating a scientific community in an underdeveloped country,” but rather one of creating a non-dominating scientific community, of creating a technocounterculture. It is incumbent on writers, theorists, artists, activists, scholars and critics alike to produce a viable vision of this type of community, one of democratic technologies of empowerment rather than colonizing, monopolistic technologies of domination. Constructing imaginary pasts that never were is part and parcel of the dominating discourse of science, as evidenced by the complicity, in the final analysis, between Esquivel and Fortes and Lomnitz in characterizing science and technology as foreign in ‘edenic’ Latin America. Science and technology are not foreign to Latin America, but rather an integral part of both past and present domination, and of any future liberation and empowerment. Only through a technoliterate vision that accepts this reality can viable change be conceptualized and disseminated. The question that remains, then, is where are the visionaries to accomplish this, and why have we not heard from them?
Notes
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For example, the lack of adequate environmental regulations and governmental oversight is an invitation to disaster in fields such as biogenetics and nuclear power, either by accident or by military intention.
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This growing realization has engendered a new field, cyborg studies:
For some time now there has been a rumor going around that the age of the human has given way to the age of the posthuman. … Humans are not the end of the line. Beyond them looms the cyborg, a hybrid species created by crossing biological organism with cybernetic mechanism.
(Hayles 321)
Cyborg anthropology explores a new alternative by examining the argument that human subjects and subjectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations, and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators.
(Downey, Dumit, and Williams 343)
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The image of the Gringo Scientist is a recurrent one in Latin American literature, Mr. Herbert of the banana company in Cien años and the “tiny gringo” expert Mr. Brown in La casa de los espíritus being but two examples. Indeed, from Faust, to Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove, the scientist is a recurrent theme in Western literature (Haynes). For examples in Peninsular literature, see Cano Ballesta.
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A few examples provided by González Echevarría (14–15) will serve to illustrate the point: Miguel Angel Asturias (Leyendas de Guatemala), Alejo Carpentier (Los pasos perdidos, ¡Ecué-Yamba-O!), and Lydia Cabrera (El monte), also a student of Fernando Ortiz, studied ethnology in Paris in the 1930s. Severo Sarduy (De donde son los cantantes) was a student of Roger Bastide, and José María Arguedas (Los ríos profundos) was an anthropologist, as was Miguel Barnet (Biografia de un cimarrón).
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On the question of whether the novel represents a parodic discourse of resistance to the patriarchal masculine novel, “la reivindicación de un espacio de lo femenino” (Chaverri 31), or is “simplista, maniquea … plagada de convencionalismos banales” (Marquet 58), the admittedly partial review of the literature I have done seems to indicate a bicameral division along feministnon-feminist lines. That is, read from a feminist context (Chaverri; Jaffe; Oropesa; González Stephan; Potvin) it is a parody and hence a discourse of resistance, while from the non-feminist perspective (Marquet; Fadanelli) it is simply cliche. This essay seeks not to resolve this debate, but rather to address the somewhat more pragmatic issue of the efficacy of the epistemological and ideological positions advocated in the novel, call them what one may, in terms of providing a model for long-term sustainable relations between techno-science, society, and nature in Latin America.
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On the metadiscourse in anthropology, see Geertz; and Clifford. On the metadiscourse in Latin American narrative see González Echevarría (152–53). The best critique of the ethnography of the period, and of Lévi-Strauss, is still Derrida’s “The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau” (101–40).
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For a sampling of the many texts in this field, see Rose on geography; Harding on general science; Haraway on primatology; Latour on biology and chemistry; Bleier on biology; Mires on ecology; and Wood on cartography.
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Weber thought modern society institutionalized instrumental reason in the form of bureaucracy, which in turn transformed instrumental reason into domination. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that when science enters the cultural field, their term is “the culture industry,” the objectifying nature of the scientific epistemology leads to the objectification and domination of human beings.
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The allusion is to Freud’s book of the same name. In English the title is Civilization and its Discontents.
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The film is extremely faithful to the novel (Potvin).
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