2 - Mythologizing the internal Other: rural tradition as antidote to modern civilization

Summary

Introduction: literary criollismos and national culture

Buenos Aires's nervousness bursts out in all directions, and when the reflections of the automobiles appear on the shop-windows or their shadows creep onto the walls and pavements, this abstract movement shows its superficial form to the fullest. […] This horizontal movement is all about speed rather than the steadiness of good purpose […]. It looks like a race without control.

The author of these words is Argentine Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895–1964), best known for perpetuating Sarmiento's discourse on New World barbarism in his sociological essay Radiografía de la Pampa (1933). However, his much lesser known critique of the degeneracy of urban culture, Cabeza de Goliat (1944), shows the enduring influence of a counter narrative first produced, as I argue, at the peak of the civilizational debate. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has identified two important aspects in the ‘invention’ of symbolic and ritual practices in processes of nation-building: firstly, an attempt to establish continuities with a historic past, and secondly a response to radical socio-economic changes. Hobsbawm suggests that although ‘[t]here is probably no time and place with which historians are concerned which has not seen the “invention” of tradition’, it is likely to occur more often ‘when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which “old” traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable’. Both features can be found in the creation of a rural tradition in the Southern Cone during the first decade of the twentieth century. The discursive recovery of the rural past was a response to these profound transformations. But the Latin American context is made more complex by two distinctive features. Firstly, both in Chile and in the River Plate the liberal generations of the nineteenth century had elevated the city to bastion of civilization against the barbarity of the countryside, establishing this dichotomy as a founding element of nation-building. Secondly, the notion of civilization was essentially derivative, outward-looking, which implied a difficult effort of discursive reappropriation of the ‘native’ as authentically national.

It has been noted that

in the process of formulating and inventing the nation […] we always run up against a paradoxical confrontation with ‘the Other’.