Fernando Coronil: a Brief Appreciation Charles L

OBITUARY

Fernando Coronil: A Brief Appreciation Charles L. Briggs

t would be impossible to summarize Fernando work, Coronil denied his readers comfortable sim- Coronil’s work in a short essay, particularly plifications to replace the binary oppositions that he Iwhen so little time has elapsed since his sud- implicated and complicated. Moreover, Coronil was den death in August 2011. Moreover, a laudatory gloss always deeply engaged in theory, but his use of it never would prove an inappropriate means of appreciating involved the trotting out of sacred cows. Rather than a scholar whose spirit of critical engagement was cen- simply invoking major theorists, he often focused tral to his contribution to anthropology, history, and on how they became implicated in what he referred Latin American studies. I thus offer a few reflections to, in “Beyond Occidentalism,” as “the complicity of here on dimensions of his work that have provided power and knowledge entailed in Orientalism.” He challenges to my own scholarship. was just as quick to indict theoreticians for dissolv- His essay “Beyond Occidentalism,” published in ing particular relational histories in broad universal- Cultural Anthropology in 1996, provided a provocative ist claims as he was to indict researchers who studied critique of parochial, regional, and national scholar- Latin American societies without “placing regional ship. “Occidentalism” for him was not the reverse of developments within global transformations, resist- Edward Said’s Orientalism. Rather, Coronil urged us ing the desire to privilege a bounded singularity or a to reoriente “our attention from the problematic of determining totality.” ‘Orientalism,’ which focuses on the deficiencies of the In The Magical State, one of the most widely read West’s representations of the Orient, to that of ‘Oc- works by an anthropologist on Latin America, Cor- cidentalism,’ which refers to the conceptions of the onil described his alternative as “oscillating between a West animating these representations.” He was par- critical localism and a critical globalism.” This created ticularly interested in locating how understandings of a fascinating texture in which he explored how the Self and Other, so-called center and periphery, were Venezuelan state constructed itself during the 20th relationally co-produced and then reified as bounded, century by mediating between what he described as autonomously created units, thereby disaggregating its two bodies, social and natural. Coronil went be- their relational histories and turning difference into yond analyses that would locate the contradictions of hierarchy. In locating the key feature of Occidentalist Venezuelan history and society in the immanent eco- projects, he pointed to “the ethnocentric hierarchiza- nomic effects of massive petroleum resources to view tion of cultural difference” that “is intimately connect- how both dictatorship and democracy were framed as ed to the deployment of global power.” Coronil was magical acts that could pull modernity out of a hat. deeply fascinated by Venezuela, and nearly all of his His elegant analyses of alternative constructions work emerged from years of painstaking ethnography, of progress and modernity, invoking but not simply interviews, and archival and media research. Never- reproducing European or North American notions, theless, “Beyond Occidentalism” sounded a strong created complicated fabrics that wove together eth- warning that research on Latin American countries nographic and archival detail with attempts to re- must form part of larger, relational projects. think the basic problems that emerge from political Characteristic in this essay, as in so much of his economy and social theory. One of the reasons this book crosses disciplines, becoming a crucial text Charles L. Briggs is Professor of Anthropology at the University of for scholars of Latin America and beyond, was his California, Berkeley. capacity to engage historical and ethnographic per-

58 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS VOL. 45, NO. 3 in the January/February 2011 is- sue of the NACLA Report.) One of the fundamental gifts that Coronil gave to research on Ven- ezuela was to challenge scholars to go beyond both celebratory and critical varieties of exceptionalism, beyond naturalizing the categories that too often confine scholarship to either national stages in Venezu- ela or small cadres of “Venezuela- nists” in the north. He ruthlessly dared scholars to bring larger histories and perspectives into work on Venezuela and to do their research in such a way that its im- plications for larger debates are not only evident but read and debated by scholars globally. Coronil’s own scholarship provides models of how anthropologists and histori- ans might approach this challenge and the sort of impact it can have. I remember that Coronil once asked me to translate a phrase that he planned to use the next day in Fernando Coronil in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2010. mariana coronil a conference on studies of colonial and postcolonial theorizing. The spectives in such a way that he formations, of the sort that have phrase, in reference to his own could rethink fundamental his- recently brought the financial sys- scholarly position, was una cu- torical assumptions and histori- tem to a state of near collapse, that caracha en baile de gallinas. I loved cize ethnographic perspectives. were undermining its ability to the richness and perversity of this Coronil joined anthropology and magically create the illusion that metaphor, a cockroach thrust into history at the hip. it could bestow abundance and the middle of a dance of chickens. The importance of Coronil’s col- progress on the people by repro- I read it as providing a clue to the laboration with Julie Skurski, in ducing “ever more overtly its of- productivity of his critical rela- their 2006 essay, “Dismembering ficial image as the protector of an tionship to scholarship, perhaps and Remembering the Nation,” and anarchic pueblo.” particularly as a Venezuelan-born their edited volume in which that Coronil dedicated years to re- academic working in elite U.S. in- essay is contained, States of Vio- searching the April 2002 coup stitutions: He was in the middle of lence, is particularly striking. There against President Hugo Chávez, the dance, feeling like an uninvit- they examine how the Venezuelan and he left behind a vast archive ed, and possibly vulnerable, out- state was constructed through of interviews with coup insiders sider. Unfortunately, we can no two acts of brutal repression: a and close analyses of documents, longer count on Fernando Coronil massacre of rural Venezuelans in including dueling videos that himself to insistently ask how our October 1988 and the violence claimed to reveal “the truth” of the work might be “intimately con- that followed popular resistance violence that provided a pretext for nected to the deployment of glob- to the imposition of neoliberal re- the coup. (An essay drawing on this al power.” The scholarship he left forms in February 1989. The essay research, “Venezuela’s Wounded behind will, however, keep dis- scrutinizes the Venezuelan state’s Bodies: Nation and Imagination rupting the dance—and changing response to global economic trans- During the 2002 Coup,” appeared the beat.

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