Rear Shoulder Blade Pain

, Beatriz Sarlo

The two nations

I first saw the vegetation under the moonlight.

Too strange and exotic. reveals its exoticism

slowly through the veil of familiar things.

I went into the bush. For a moment I was afraid

and I had to control myself.

Malinowski wrote these words in his diary, eighty years ago. He had traveled to the Trobriand Islands to face a critical research of modern anthropology. It was a Pole who was English by his tastes and habits and European (ie non-English) for their mentality. He kept the exact distance to the cultures he studied and he cursed the moment he decided to study them. The publication of his diaries , until recently unknown, shows how he wearied of life on the islands of the Pacific, dirt and so called ( quite some anthropological) lack of civilization.

She tells me she can not go on Saturdays and Sundays. Everything together, since they are married, she and her husband, must be protected during the weekends: the TV, electric alarm clock, the tape recorder, the multiprocessor and kitchenware. Monday through Friday, a little neighbor cared for the child and the house: rather, it contains locked, turn the TV at seven in the morning and expect them to return at six in the afternoon. Then, the girl next door termiana day work of serene and woman with her husband begin to live and prepare the house for the night. The girl next door works not finally week. The woman and her husband, on Saturday morning, they take turns shopping, take the boy to the square and made a run to the house of the mother or the mother. At dusk, close doors, windows would clog and begin to look after the house. On Sunday, the same thing. On Monday, relieving the girl next door.

The fund gives a wasteland, separated by a perimeter wall which is crowned with shards of glass. Anyway, the wall was chipped several times by people seeking a way to cut or break, passing through the bottom of the house, wearing a shirt that hung from the rope. in the background is the pump and pump motor, under a tin bell, secured the floor by chains. This pump is a constant concern because the chains can be cut. From the barren background noise of birds arrive, meowing at night, and smell of the countryside. There is an exotic, is simply a dangerous area at night.

To the side of the coast to the east and north, thirty blocks away, takes the highway. At six o'clock in the afternoon, the car caravan to tuck in the country-club, together they feel more protected from violence and assaults. Close to the country-clubs are slums and slums, the caravan of cars going sideways, almost untouched. But it is impossible not to see them, sheets and cartons that look like a box material Berni.

On Sunday morning, the people of the country-club takes field trips to the nearest supermarket. They can also purchase, at the side of the highway selling kites mandarins and adolescents from the villas. Among the country-club and supermarket runs a landscape whose mixture is vaguely exotic: it reminds photos of Mexico City or Lima. Several blocks from the highway, you see the thatched roofs of the houses in the country-club, closer, mounds of eucalyptus, on the road, badly dressed boys waving bouquets or boxes of strawberries, on the route finally sheet structures, grills enveloped in smoke, and cars with glass polarized go to the supermarket or get their owners to visit friends.

A night under the moonlight, the landscape is strange. The exotic nature of "slowly reveals" a middle-range stirring sounds: the cries of birds, the rustle of the leaves on the mounds of eucalyptus, Bailanta music coming from the town, footsteps on the gravel beside the Highway, runs, and the hum of car engines when fired over a hundred. Occasionally, a blast of rock or shot.

day be together images of two nations (the people of the tile roofs of the boxes and sheet), and at night are mixed also, the sounds of two na tions, "under vegetation and in light of the moon."

At the junction of the highway with a major street in the metropolitan area, the inhabitants of both nations make their exchanges, the women of the boxes are offered for domestic work or sell lemons and basil plants, they and their men also ; shopping there a few things, hardware, plastic bowls, medium and divers. under the highway, important corners, large swimming pools corralones sold in plastic, and giant blue are supported against each other, next to racks of equipment, planters greenhouse folding chairs and tables with umbrella. All businesses have security bars, police dogs, alarms, safes built into the walls. The boys of women who offer their work roam between bus stops or park on any station that is not completely hostile, in other stations, are the teenagers in the country-clubs who eat burgers while watches their bikes.

The landscape is more or less ordered on Sunday morning. At night, the lights are sordid in bus stops around the teens that spin fishing, watching passing cars. At dawn, the desolation of the mixture of light and silence half expands on the remains of the two nations: a convertible with the blaring pasacasette, kiosk that come to their journals, some guys from beer cans and pizza boxes. The eucalyptus grove is a black background partially hidden by the huge volumes of swimming pools as whales stranded in the courtyard of the corrals. The set "too strange and exotic" slowly reveals itself through the "veil of familiar things."

Perhaps most familiar are the names painted on the walls of the highway, on downhill toward avenues Duhalde, Pierri, Menem 99. For some reason, people in the boxes and the country-club I put a vote in the years that passed.

Beatriz Sarlo, Snapshots , media, city and Customs at the end of the century, Cia Editora Espasa Calpe SA / Ariel

About the author: Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires n. , 1942) is an essayist Argentina in the field of literary and cultural criticism. Argentina was a professor of literature at the Faculty of Arts the University Buenos Aires . Taught at the universities of Columbia, Berkeley, Maryland and Minnesota, was a fellow of the Wilson Center in Washington and Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. It is part of the group of Latin American intellectual critics, focuses on studies of postmodernity the subcontinent, which he called peripheral modernity. The book of the same title alongside scenes postmodern life have earned him the consecration in the academic field. Apart from its texts, its columns, in leading journals of culture Argentina and Latin America - a lucid attempt to socio-cultural transformations now turned much of the crisis of modernity and the effects of neoliberalism. The way in which, in terms of Karl Marx - there is the reification of social codes gives way to understand how a system is the capital at the expense of the obsolete and decaying social institutions today.

The mall, if shopping is a good responds to a total order but at the same time, should give an idea of \u200b\u200bfree travel: it is derived from the ordinate (...) market only very young children can get lost in a mall, because an accident can separate them from other people and that absence is not balanced by the meeting of goods.

This crisis of the institutions (with all its public space) represents a shift to modern peripheral set is suspended on the imitation of modernity. In this sense, it shares a place in the analysis of current latioamericana culture with authors such as Néstor García Canclini or Jesus Martin-Barbero .

Beatriz Sarlo is married to film director Rafael Filipelli .