On November 25, 2019, Chilean feminist collective, Las Tesis, gathered in Santiago’s Plaza de Armas. Against a backdrop of anti-Piñera graffiti painted on government buildings, museums, and Catholic church properties, some 50 members of the collective wearing black blindfolds began to chant a rhythm now heard around the world.

The patriarchy is a judge
that judges us for being born
and our punishment
is the violence you don’t see…

The lyrics continue on to connect patriarchal state structures to femicide, disappearances, rape, the police, judges, the state, the president, and perhaps most importantly, impunity. The most powerful phrase, repeated twice, is:

The oppressive state is a rapist.
The rapist is you.

(lyrics from Women’s March 2020)

To read the full article, click here to go to Anthropology News
También se aparece aquí en español, después del inglés 

Baird Campbell and I have written a blog post, available on Platypus, the blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. The blog details the ways we see Chileans distrusting traditional media outlets and using social media as an archive...yet an archive that is already assumed to be unstable. 

This rift in the types of videos that we received privately, rather than posted publicly indicates a particular understanding of the uses of Internet-based communication. In fact, it seems to indicate an anxiety about digital communication related to its potential ephemerality, a shortcoming that can only be remedied by widespread sharing and archiving across diversified social networks across the globe.

To read the full blog post, click here to go to Platypus.
O haz click aquí para leer en español 

​Chilean Media Amidst Protest

I woke up Saturday morning with a direct Instagram message from my friend Mateo. “Share please,” it said, with a formatted text with the title “State of Constitutional Emergency in Chile, October 2019.” In the 3 days since, he continued to send infographics and then videos of protests, each time asking me to share them.
 
“The media here is making it seem as if we are violent delinquents, but we are mostly peaceful. And the media outside of Chile isn’t showing anything. Please help us share the message.”
 
As Chile has recently erupted in protest, police violence, and other sorts of chaos, from the Atacama to Patagonia, media is taking on a central role in the tensions. From 2013-2016 I lived in Chile, in both the capital of Santiago, and the far north region. Coincidentally, Mateo lived in the north while I did, though he had spent most of his life in Santiago, and has since returned. His use, as well as criticism, of media, along with dozens of other Chileans in both the metropolitan region and the north, provide important insight to many protestors’ grievances and tactics in this historic moment.


Chile in State of Emergency
 
On Sunday 13 October, Chile’s Transport Ministry announced that the Santiago metro would raise fares by 30 pesos (about 4 cents in USD). This seemingly small increase, however, must be placed in the context of the average Chilean’s monthly salary around $450.
 
In response students started organizing fare-dodging acts all over the city. Fare dodging is not uncommon in Santiago where late-night bus drivers are often defenseless against crowds of young people pouring onto the bus or jumping turnstiles without paying. This coordinated effort however far exceeded previous levels.
 
Soon the protest spread beyond students, particularly when politicians made poorly calculated comments in response (link to The Minister of Economy, Juan Andrés Fontaine, indicated live on TV that workers should get up earlier to catch public transport when the fare is lower).
 
But these protests are not simply about a fare increase. As many hashtags and memes attest, it is not about 30 pesos, but about 30 years of inequality.
 
Chile is classified as a highly developed country by the World Bank, but also consistently ranks as having the very highest rates of social inequality among such countries. A meme which was first shared with me on Sunday October 20th, depicts an iceberg with “Increased public transport cost” above water and a long list of other effects of neoliberalism below the surface: poor but expensive education, deficient healthcare system, pension system crisis, inadequate salaries along with high disparity between general public and the political elite, precarious employment, police corruption, corporate corruption and collusion, and even the privatization of water. 

These grievances are attributed to the last 30 years—the time since the “No” vote which ended the brutal dictatorship of Agosto Pinochet. While “neoliberalism” is often a catch-all phrase for economics associated with the free market, post-1985, in Chile it is directly connected to Pinochet’s regime, who specifically brought Milton Friedman to the country in 1973 to impose economic “shock” theories as a test case. His policies privatized companies and resources, deregulated business, cut social services, and opened the country to unimpeded imports. Inflation then spiraled to 374% and unemployment reached 20% per cent. The government almost entirely defunded social services, the social security system was privatized, health care became a pay-as-you-go system, and public schools were replaced with charter schools. Pinochet’s government maintained these policies until 1982 when the Chilean economy crashed – debt exploded, hyperinflation took hold and unemployment rocketed to 30 per cent. Pinochet’s regime was finally defeated in a democratic election in 1989. However, many Chileans feel subsequent democratically elected administrations have only intensified the export-oriented neoliberal reforms, though with less violent and totalitarian control. 


Chilean Media
 
While Reporters without Borders gives Chile a favorable score for press freedom, they note that “pluralism and democratic debate are limited” by media ownership concentrated among the elite who share interests with those in political power. Community media, particularly in radio, has a long history in the country, but its ability to spread information widely is not always adequate.
 
At the same time, about 78% of Chileans have Internet access and most are well-connected on social media. Yet as I found in northern Chile, many people shy away from discussing politics openly on social media, in part a lingering result of sixteen years of dictatorship. While many northern Chileans post funny memes about how politicians are disconnected from the lives of “real Chileans,” they shy away from direct criticism or analysis of politicians and policy. One exception I found was that during the April 2014 8.2 Richter scale earthquake in the region, northerners realized the world was paying attention and use primarily Facebook and Instagram as stages for calling attention to the lingering effects of the natural disaster and the national government’s slow and inadequate disaster relief.
 
Northerners also use social media to demonstrate the ways they differ from even regular people in Santiago. They see Santiago as a place of consumption, whereas the North, known for its rich copper deposits, is a place of labor. Santiago is a place of strangers and vulnerability to urban crime, while northerners watch out for one another. They see Santiago as the beneficiaries of their work, as wealthy and politically elite, even as they may know working-class people there. Overall, Santiago is framed as having very little in common with the northern region of the country.
 
Social media use in Santiago is more similar to the types of political engagement we see by those connecting online from countries in North America or Western Europe. Most people are forthright about their political stances and use social media as a space for criticism and at times, campaigning. While they do not take much time to compare themselves with those outside of the metropolitan region, northerners would use this fact as further evidence that those in Santiago hardly realize anyone else in the country exists. 


October 2019
 
Because Mateo has lived most of his life in Santiago, I was not particularly struck that his feed quickly filled with protest-related content. But just a day later I began to see photographs and videos of protests being posted by Chileans in the north of the country. People shouting in the street in Arica, Iquique, and Antofogasta appeared in my Facebook and Instagram inboxes with little comment other than “please share.” In my 18 months living in the region, I had only ever seen those sorts of crowds in the streets after the national football team won a championship.
 
This use of social media was a departure from the sorts of usual posts northerners shared. It reminded me of post-earthquake posts in the ways they attempted to address a global audience in order to bring an issue of injustice to attention. These posts differed from the somewhat apolitical posts after the earthquake. The social media content of northerners in the last few days has been highly political, often accompanied by hashtags calling for the president to resign.
 
Thus, it is clear that northerners see these calls as legitimate and possible. They are not apt to share such sentiments as a pipe dream, but rather save their political calls to action for moments in which they believe they are justified, possible, and aided by international attention. Essentially these posts demonstrate that northerners sense a real possibility of change. 

​We are united
 
On October 20, President Piñera, flanked by almost 2 dozen military leaders, declared on national television, “We are at war against a powerful enemy, unrelenting, that doesn’t respect anything or anyone, and that is apt to use violence and delinquency without limit, that is apt to burn our hospitals, the metro, the supermarkets, with the only purpose to produce as much damage as possible.”
 
In response, Chileans throughout the country took to social media, asserting “We are not at war, we are united.”
​
While nationalist discourses in Chile are common, they are usually colored by equally powerful senses of regional belonging, that may just as easily highlight difference among Chileans as call for unity. Yet, social media is now showing this slogan to be quite true. For a moment, Chileans throughout the country are seeing “the people” of different regions, including those of Santiago, as united against politicians, corruption, and inequality. If tweets demanding that Piñera resign or that Chile has awoken are any indication, Chileans from all over the 2600 mile long coastline are coming together with a common message, that they are united against the inequalities they have faced for the last 30 years. 
​

this fieldnote was originally posted on The Geek Anthropologist

Social media is no longer the geek domain it once was, with the Americas and Europe approaching a fifty percent penetration rate, and an overall global penetration rate of over thirty percent. But as these platforms and apps become more widely used, they also become more specialized to certain kinds of use intended for certain kinds of audiences. And as audiences shift, new types of communities emerge through social media.

In field Alto Hospicio, a marginal city in northern Chile, some of the most interesting ethnographic details have to do with the ways young people use collaboratively managed Tumblr accounts to create a sense of a community through language play and humor, extending beyond the local area to a nationally imagined community. This identification with a national community is actually quite an anomaly, because in many senses the people of Alto Hospicio often distinguish themselves from people in other regions of the country, considering themselves to be more marginal and exploited than the average Chilean citizen. The city is located in a booming copper mining area, but most residents are low-level workers in the industry, and watch as the massive profits end up in the national capital of Santiago or abroad in Europe, North America, and Australia. In general, most citizens envision themselves as economically disadvantaged and politically (and geographically) marginalized. While marginality is often used as a category of analysis within the social sciences, generally to describe the conditions of people who struggle to gain societal and spatial access to resources and full participation in political life, in the case of Alto Hospicio, marginality is incorporated into the ways citizens view their own position in contrast to those people the see as more powerful in the center of the country. In actively distancing themselves from cities such as Santiago – both in daily life and through their online activity – residents of Alto Hospicio see their marginalized city as part of the way they perceive them- selves – not as victims, but as an exploited community that continues to fight for its rights. Yet they strongly identify as Chileans, citing their cultural affiliations rather than political power.

​Please read the full blog on THE GEEK ANTHROPOLOGIST

My book review of Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes is now published at Anthropology Book Forum. Though to me, the book didn't have much relevance to Anthropology or Indigenous Studies (as I had hoped), and was based on interviews but not immersed ethnography, it was useful and important in a lot of other ways. Check out my review here.

“I joined a protest group!” Andres proclaimed proudly, knowing that I tend to be a loud proponent of the right of individuals to shake things up with collective action.

“What are you protesting?” I asked, and he pulled out his cracked Samsung Galaxy to show me. He opened Whatsapp and handed me the phone, where I read a brief manifesto in opposition to the construction of a parking lot for Bolivian trucks in Arica. “They’re going to spend 3.2 million dollars on a parking lot! And not for Chileans. For Bolivians. Do you think Bolivia has parking lots for Chilean vehicles? Or are there parking lots for us in Argentina and Colombia? No! With that money they could build homes, they could feed how many families for a year, they could fix the roads.”

Though a parking lot for Bolivian trucks may seem like a silly issue (and a strange one to those unfamiliar with Bolivian/Chilean politics), it cuts to the heart of much deeper issues of nationalism. The two countries are currently waiting for International Court of Justice at The Hague to decide if they will consider Bolivia’s claim to renegotiate coastal access, which was lost in the War of the Pacific in the late 1800s (see my Primer on the Bolivian-Chilean Maritime Conflict). Bolivia claims that, through they ceded the coastline in a 1904 treaty, Chile is obligated to negotiate coastal access based on Chile’s offers to sea access long after the treaty was enforced (see article in The Economist). 

While on the surface this is a dispute about trade and more than a century’s worth of lost GDP (not to mention the copper fields Bolivia lost in the war, which currently make up more than 30% of Chile’s export market). There are deeply nationalistic emotions that arise in these debates as well. Even for lower middle class Bolivians and Chileans—the type of people who would see little to no change in economic terms—are deeply invested in these issues. Many Bolivians see Chileans as arrogant local imperialists, publishing books such as Chile Depredador [Chile, the Predator]. Many Chileans, particularly in the northern region near the border with Bolivia, see Bolivians as backwards and uneducated, looking to get ahead by taking advantage of Chile’s resources, either by immigrating to work or trying to take a coastline that is rightfully Chilean. While for a few, solidarity across borders relies on class (see my blog on The Border: A view from Facebook), the grand majority of these national citizens have internalized their nationalism to the extent that their own lack of benefits from the arrangement and the similarities between lower middle class citizens on both sides of the border are simply overlooked.

This is particularly perplexing, given that northerners’ relationship with nationalism is rarely straightforward. Regional affiliation is usually much more important than national, as many feel disenfranchised from national politics and overlooked by the national government who simply extracts resources and money from the northern region’s copper mines, while leaving the people without social services. Yet there is strong identification with Chileanness when related to cultural forms such as food, sport, and heritage. This may be largly thanks to the process of “Chileanization” enacted in the territory when it was transferred to Chilean control in 1883. To mitigate resentment towards the military and new nation as a whole, the Chilean government launched a projects aimed at incorporating the northern population into the nation-state through religion and education for both children and adults, with mestizaje and modernization at the core of the country’s nationalist discourse. 

Even today, discourses of modernity undergird the tensions between Chilean and Bolivian citizens. The conflation of nation, modernity, and race means that for northern Chileans, they represent modern mestizo subjects, while Bolivians are poor, traditional, and indigenous (which is particularly amplified by Bolivia’s recent symbolic valorization of indigeneity under Evo Morales and the MAS government).

The border dispute, for these citizens that stand little chance of material benefit or loss from a renegotiation, is important because it cuts to the root of self-understanding. To cede a border to Bolivia would mean defeat by a country and people who not only are behind in terms of modernization, but use that as an excuse to extract resources that rightfully belong to Chileans (there are certainly parallels here with discourses about Mexican and Central American immigrants to the United States). For Bolivians, Chile’s unwillingness to open negotiations is simply evidence that the nation and its residents remain unrepentant (and at times racist) thieves.

So then, why is a parking lot so important? Not only, as Andres pointed out could that money, taken from Chilean taxes (and thus rightfully belonging to Chileans), be used for something to benefit Chileans, but ceding something to Bolivians admits that perhaps there is a need for negotiation. And those negotiations are not only about access to maritime trade, but are about what it means to be a modern mestizo citizen.

This belonging was closely associated with conceptions of social and economic class, which were almost always highlighted, claiming solidarity with working class and non-cosmopolitan lifestyle. At times this even led to cross-border identifications in which perceptions of common class and proletariat ideals superseded national identification. Similarly, differences in race and particularly indigeneity were often erased in service of highlighting a broader sense of marginality, in which most Hospiceños could claim a part, rather than compartmentalizing or hierarchizing forms of disadvantage.

Further Reading

A Primer on the Bolivian-Chilean Maritime Conflict
The Peruvian-Chilean Maritime Border: A View from Facebook

The Economist - Bolivia's Access to the Sea
The Economist - The Economics of Landlocked Countries

Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Cástulo Martínez, Chile Depredador (La Paz: Librería Editorial G.U.M., 2010, 3er ed).

As many entries in the blog affirm, local cultural aspects are often reflected or made even more visual on social media. As I have written before of my fieldsite, there is a certain normativity that pervades social life. Material goods such as homes, clothing, electronics, and even food all fall within an “acceptable” range of normality. No one is trying to keep up with Joneses, because there’s no need. Instead the Joneses and the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Correas all outwardly exhibit pretty much the same level of consumerism. Work and salary similarly fall within a circumscribed set of opportunities, and because there is little market for advanced degrees, technical education or a 2 year post-secondary degree is usually the highest one will achieve academically. This acceptance of normativity is apparent on social media as well.

One particularly amusing example of this type of acceptance is especially apparent from a certain style of meme that overwhelmed Facebook in October of 2014. These “Rana René” (Kermit the Frog, in English) memes expressed a sense of abandoned aspirations. In these memes, the frog expresses desire for something—a better physique, nicer material goods, a better family- or love-life—but concludes that it is unlikely to happen, and that “se me pasa,” “I get over it.”

A lot of my friends in North America were rooting for Brazil in the World Cup. As a newly adopted Chilena, it annoyed me a bit. But I also never had anything against Brazil, except that they are far from an underdog, and I generally root for teams like Ghana and Costa Rica. I think for anthropologists in particular Brazil is the land of Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Death Without Weeping, and Donna Goldstein’s “Interracial” Sex and Racial Democracy: Twin Concepts? Though we know a true post-racial state doesn’t exist, Brazil captures our imaginations: beautiful beaches, beautiful people who at least marginally have attempted to overcome the institutionalized forms of racism we in the northern half of America are still struggling with. It is developed enough to be enticing, yet still retains a sense of chaotic charms that makes it seem like a place that is ethnographically enticing. For non-anthropologists from North America, it’s all about beaches, brothels, carnival, samba, and futball*.

An anthropologist friend commented on the Brazil v The Netherlands game for third place via Facebook: “Why is everybody hating on Brazil so bad? A colonizing nation kicked a neo-colonized nation's ass. And got most of Latin America, aka the neo-colonized neighbors, to cheer about this. Helloooo, false consciousness????”

This confusion I think is reasonable and common for people in North America. And I am no expert on futball fandom in South America, but I’ve now seen two separate World Cup cycles from this half of America (one from Lima, Peru and one from here in Northern Chile) Being an anthropologist, I’ve noted certain things. Also, I’m going on three years around these parts and I know some things about international relations. So here goes…

First, at least in the Andes, Brazil retains it’s “far away paradise” image. People with money go to Rio for vacation, spend their time on the beach, eating tasty things, staring at hot people, dancing Samba, possibly partying at Carnival, and maybe even going to a brothel. For others who are not as well off, it is a mystical land that is close enough to dream about but not quite reach (at least for now).

Yet, part of that partially obtainable dream is Brazil’s economy. Brazil’s economy ranks seventh in the world by both Gross Domestic Product and by Purchasing Power Parity. They fall behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The next Latin American country on the (GDP) list is Mexico, which ranks 14th, and the next South American country is Argentina which ranks 26 (and then Chile at 36). In essence, for my friends in Northen Chile, Brazil might as well be Miami—in fact Chileans don’t even need a visa to enter the US). For others, like Bolivians, Brazil may technically be far easier to enter than the United States, but exchange rates are so unfavorable to the boliviano that it would be difficult for a middle class family to afford vacationing there. Essentially, Brazil is closer, but their economic position is much closer to North America and Europe than their South American neighbors. 

But even if we believe Lukács that all relations are structured by the condition of capitalism (and I’ll leave that up to you to decide), these relations run much deeper than simple exchange rates. Brazil for reasons economic and otherwise often has an excellent national team. This is partially why North Americans even notice that they exist. When’s the last time any North American tuned into a Bolivian game? Or can even find Bolivia on a map for that matter? But the fact that Brazil consistently fields a good team means they get international attention. These economic and futball success factors are indeed a large part of why Brazil was chosen to host the World Cup.

But this futball success also means that they usually beat their neighbors at the game that is most important to most fans. Chile, in particular, has been eliminated from the World Cup by Brazil in 2014, 2010, 1998, and 1962. That is every single time they have ever made it out of the group stage. Just (literally) bringing the Brazilian team to it’s knees this time around was a source of national pride. Brazil has also won 4 of the last 6 Copa America championships. In high school sports, they would be the fancy private school that hires university coaches and always makes it to the State Final.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that this phenomenon extends to Argentina as well. Though unstable, their economy (currently ranked 26th in GDP) is still above Chile’s and Peru’s, and certainly Bolivia’s. Two Chilean friends who recently traveled to Buenos Aires for vacation recounted to me how their expectations of destitution and poverty were entirely blown away. “The people are still partying. And the drinks weren’t that cheap!” they told me.

Again, similar to Brazil, Argentina is a futball powerhouse. They have qualified in every World Cup for the last 40 years, and only once have not made it out of the group stage. They have played in the final game in four of the last 10 Copa America tournaments. They are also home to the most visible and recognizable South American futball club, the Boca Jrs. And they have Messi (who is often considered arrogant and dismissive of fans). In fact, one Bolivian fan told me “The Argentinos are individualistic. They don’t work as a team, but try to be the star like Messi, the worst arrogant one.” Again, we’re talking private school here.

But possibly more importantly, Argentina is a “natural rival” of Chile (and Brazil too). They have had territory disputes. And according to at least one Chilean, “they laughed at our loss [to Brazil].” A Bolivian woman reflected general South American stereotypes of the country: “Argentines are snooty. They think they’re gods. Go ahead and cry Argentinos!” These feelings are obviously not homogenous. One miner who watched the game while at work told me that bets among coworkers were even for Germany and for Argentina. And there are plenty of fans who think that “If you’re from South America you should always support our neighboring country, just as Europeans support Germany. It’s a shame.” But the point here is that while people may have personal reasons to support Argentina or Brazil, or may feel a sense of South American unity, there are also many structural reasons South Americans do not support these teams. 

In relation to my friend’s Facebook question, I think it’s important to realize that while colonialism certainly shaped the form of today’s nation-states and alliances to a great extent, this is not the full story. Just as assumptions that South Americans were less civilized than their European colonizers, it would be incredibly Eurocentric to believe that some sense of historical unity against Europe would trump the present day tensions between South American citizens. History is important to them, but so are their  present relationships to their material conditions of existence. From a global perspective, South America might not be the most sought after school district, but there are still a few kids who always have the latest Air Jordans.

 *Yes, I know this is more commonly spelled football, fútbol, or soccer. But a Spanish-speaking friend recently misspelled the word this way, and I think it's useful for North American Spanglish speakers like myself, who need to avoid confusion with "American Football" and not alienate non-North-Americans (or Aussies or Kiwis) who might not be keen on the word soccer. So there you have it. Spread the word!

See my other blogs on the World Cup:
The World Cup on Social Media Worldwide
Seeing Red: Watching the World Cup in Northern Chile
Part of the Red Sea: Watching the World Cup in Northern Chile
Tears for the Red Sea: Watching Chile Lose in the World Cup

Goldstein, Donna
1999  “Interracial” Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts? American Anthropologist 101(3):563-578.

 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy1992  Death Without Weeping : the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

I wrote recently about the ways Chileans were watching and reacting to their team in the World Cup (both here and here). Essentially I described the way their behaviors, both on the street and on social networking sites violated the norms I have observed for nine months. While people are often ambivalent about citizenship—including both politics and belonging (see various definitions of “citizenship” including Goldberg 2002:271, Hansen and Stepputat 2006:296, Moodie 2006, Ong 2004, Richardson 1998, Stychin 1998)—when it comes to the national fútbol team, people very visually support them, decorating their homes, donning red clothing or Chilean flags, and posting wildly on Facebook, even the people who usually post very little content online.

Yet, a winning national team can easily produce such a response. The 2014 Olympics, in which the Chileans fielded only two athletes—both skiers—provide an excellent counter example. Coverage of the games was hard to find, even on the nightly news, and I didn’t know a single person who knew when the Olympic games were scheduled, let alone planned to watch. On the other hand, the national fútbol team was impossible to ignore. The supermarkets and home improvement store were covered in promotional products. Corner tiendas were suddenly filled with flag themed hats, banners, and noisemakers, and on game day, at least half of the people I passed on the street were clad in red, after the team’s uniforms. Facebook was filled with funny memes relating to the team before the game, during play with nervous statements and goal celebrations, and after with photos of people celebrating in the street. There was clearly excitement about the team’s chances. Excitement over the World Cup was not at all about being part of a world event, but was an expression of national pride and focused on the Marea Roja’s potential to come out on top.

So, then, I wondered what would happen when the team lost. I hoped, of course, that wouldn’t actually happen. That they would fulfill that potential and defeat every opponent they encountered. Unfortunately, last Saturday in a nail-biting game against Brazil, in which the home team was literally brought to their knees, the Chilean team lost. As the game ended with Gary Medel crying on screen, I expected complaints from fans. Perhaps they would blame the referees. Perhaps particular Brazilian players would be singled out for exaggerated trips or other unfair play. Maybe the coach, Jorge Sampaoli would be chastised. Or possibly, even, certain Chilean players would be blamed for mistakes.

But what I found was a great outpouring of pride. “They left everything on the field,” countless memes proclaimed. Other variations included 

“Proud to be Chilean”

“They gave everything. Thank you men. Chile is grand!”

“Thanks Chilean [team] for leaving Chileans with a proud name.”

“We lost but I’m happy about the last match. Chile gave everything that they could. They beat Australia, the put the fear in Holland, they put Spain on the airplane home, and they had Brazil on their knees. I love you Chile. Conchatumareeeeee”

Gary Medel, who cried, was hailed as a “great great warrior.” Though I expected the typically machista northern Chileans would poke fun at his emotional outpouring, I saw no joking about him crying. Plenty of memes included pictures of his face distorted and moist with tears, but the accompanying texts were ones of pride. He posted one such picture on his own Facebook page with the text “The tears are for all of you.” This photo was shared without negative comment by six of my Facebook friends. One popular meme even depicted him with the presidential sash. Another photo shared by a neighbor depicted the whole team walking off the field with Medel shedding tears in the center. “Seeing this photo gives me great pain. Chile is grand!”

Drawing on Bernett (1966) and Riordan (1977), Joseph Alter observes that athletes are often “made into a symbol who unambiguously stands for his or her country” (1994:557) in a way that is divorced from Politics with a capital P and works at the popular political level (Rowe 1999). Athletes easily become national icons because they occupy the position of fantasy figures and are divorced from the economic infrastructure (Alter 1994). Sports can ideologically reach communities in ways that politicians and government agencies cannot (Levermore 2008:184). Cho calls the “nationalist sentiment or ideology” created and perpetuated through sport, “sporting nationalism,” and suggests that unlike hegemonic forms of nationalism such as government propaganda, this form fosters “an emotional, expressive attachment…[which] often elicits voluntary patriotism” (2009:349). Gary Medel indeed is an excellent example of the ways an athlete may become even more iconic in their moments of defeat, when their emotions both reflect those of their fans, and are reproduced on television and social media in a way that I would describe as simulacramous (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987—and yes, I did just invent the world “simulacra-mous”).

Northern Chileans still maintain that they are forgotten by national politics and leaders. Their “national pride” is not one of blind adherence to national logics, agendas, or belonging. Rather the underdog status of the Marea Roja worked in parallel with Hospiceños underdog status within the nation. Just as they proclaimed during the recent earthquake that “Hospicio is Chile too,” with the national team’s successes and even close loss, it was as if they claimed “Chile is a formidable fútbol nation too!”

Here is  a slide show of the "best" memes about Chile's performance in the World Cup

See my other blogs on the World Cup:
The World Cup on Social Media Worldwide
Seeing Red: Watching the World Cup in Northern Chile
Part of the Red Sea: Watching the World Cup in Northern Chile
Where is the South American Futball Unity?


Alter, Joseph
1994 Somatic Nationalism: Indian Wrestling and Militant Hinduism. Modern Asian Studies 28(3):557-588.

Bernett, H.
1966 Nationalsozalistische Leibserziehung Schorndorf bei Stuttgart: Verlag Karl Hofmann.

Cho, Younghan
2009 Unfolding Sporting Nationalism in South Korean Media Representations of the 1968, 1984 and 2000 Olympics. Media, Culture, and Society 31(3): 347–364.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari
1987  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Dibbits 1986

Goldberg, David Theo
2002  The Racial State. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.

Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat
2006  Sovereignty Revisited.  Annual Review of Anthropology 35:295-315.

Levermore, R.
2004  Sport’s Role in Constructing the “Inter-state” Worldview.  In Sport and International Relations: An Emerging Relationship. R. Levermore and A. Budd, eds. pp. 16–30 London and New York: Routledge.

Moodie, Ellen
2005  Microbus Crashes and Coca-Cola Cash: The Value of Death in “Free-Market” El Salvador. American Ethnologist 33(1):63-80.

Ong, Aihwa
2004  Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States. In Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience. Lee D. Baker, ed. Pp.156-178. Malden, CT:Blackwell.

Richardson, Diane
1998  Sexuality and Citizenship. Sociology 32:83-100.

Riordan, J.
1977  Sport and Soviet Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowe, David
1999  Sport, Culture, and the Media: The Unruly Trinity. Buckingham: Open Univeristy Press.

Stychin, Carl Frederick
1998 A Nation By Rights: National Cultures, Sexual Identity Politics, and the Discourse of Rights. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

This weekend I presented a paper at the Royal Anthropological Institute's conference on Anthropology and Photography, titled #Instaterremoto: Tracing Crisis through Instagram Photography. As part of the conference I was given the opportunity to showcase my own photography, and exhibited twelve photos under the same title. Here I reproduce that exhibit, which can also be found at the RAI's Flickr feed here. 

On the night of 1 April 2014, Alto Hospicio suffered an 8.2 earthquake. The city was without power and water for several days and many were left homeless. Because I am researching social media usage in the city, I have paid particular attention to the photos that (usually young) residents have uploaded to Facebook and Instagram. I began adding my own images to these websites with similar hashtags to contribute to the body of imagery by residents who were were many times calling for more attention and help from the Chilean national government. In many ways, the people of Alto Hospicio felt forgotten, and were using social media to speak to whoever would listen. I took these photographs, featured here, in solidarity with others who were using their smartphone cameras to claim visibility and call for attention to the disaster.

The text of my paper presentation at RAI will be posted soon. Until then, here is the narrative of my experience of the earthquake. 
part one
part two
part three
part four
part five