Translocated roses or the myth of Eldorado: Journeys through time, space, image and silence

Abstract

The looking glass is directed towards Eldorado, a virgin subtropical land in Northeastern Argentina, around 1920. I will be following some lines of its history during the following three decades, a history that can be read in terms of bringing “civilization”, modernity and progress to an untamed savage land. The basic route was that of European immigration, in part escaping from poverty, conflict and destruction. The “locality” and the “local” –in this case as in others—are not what is left over or kept out of the center. Rather, it is part of an interrelated world. The task I propose stems from an attempt to conceptualize the “local” not in contrast to the “global” or the “macro” but rather as a shifted center from which the world can be looked at, a base from which webs of connections with other places, peoples and institutions are made and broken, shaped and reshaped. From this “descentered” center, the history of “Europe” becomes not a history of place but one of flows and webs --of people or of political and institutional links, of economic interests, of personal and family ties. Personal letters and photographs sent and received, auto- and family biographies and the photo album are the means to explore such flows. There are also the more conventional public documents and printed newspapers. It is also a story of many silences to be uncovered.

The case of Eldorado will be used to reflect upon and pose some questions about more general issues in social research: the conceptualization of local-global and center-periphery relationships; the private-public divide; the split we construct between rationality and objectivity on the one hand, and passions and emotions on the other; the “embodied” link between academic research, intellectual commitments and the public sphere; perhaps something about chance and choice in asking research questions.