Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought

Social Intersection: 1565–1995, between Mexico City, the Mountains of Chiapas, Bologna, Friuli, and Los Angeles

79 social intersection 1565–1995, between Mexico City, the Mountains of Chiapas, Bologna, Friuli, and Los Angeles In September 1994, the political scientist Adolfo Gilly sent a copy of Carlo Ginzburg’s essay “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” to the Zapatista subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas with the following handwritten dedication: “This theorizing of the thought of old Antonio (and of Heriberto) (and sometimes yours . . .) goes with all my affection” (“Con todo cariño, va esta teorización sobre el pensamiento del viejo Antonio [y de Heriberto] [y el tuyo, a veces . . .]”).1 On October 22, Marcos responded to Gilly with a critique of the essay. On April 16, 1995, Gilly wrote again, explaining at length the reasons he found Ginzburg’s work so important and showing the convergences he saw (and sees) between the work of subaltern historians like Ginzburg and the work of revolutionaries like Marcos. Both, he explained, work within the paradigm of informal knowledges theorized by Ginzburg in his essay—that is, from the “art of knowing human beings. Like so many other true forms of knowledge, this one has to do with the senses and experience” (“[el arte] de conocer a los seres humanos. Como tantos otros saberes verdaderos, éste tiene mucho que ver con los sentidos y la experiencia”).2 In October 1995, in Mexico City, this exchange between Gilly and Marcos was published in a volume, together with Ginzburg’s essay and an interview with Marcos; the title of the volume is Discusión sobre la historia. What makes this volume so intellectually exciting is the way Gilly constructs an “imagined community” around Ginzburg’s work, a 80 | Social Intersection community that, spanning several nationalities (Italy—Ginzburg; England—E. P. Thompson; France—Marc Bloch; the United States— James C. Scott; Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Cuba, and Guatemala—locales of Gilly’s political and intellectual work), also spans centuries, constructing a relation of similarity between the experiences of Marcos in Chiapas and those of the sixteenth-century miller Menocchio (as they have come down to us through the studies of Ginzburg ). What emerges from this heterogeneous array is not only a diversity of positions and methods for thinking about history but a very concrete sense of how we actually come to know about history—through a diversity of filters, experiences and displacements, all of which need to be negotiated in the telling of our stories. In my reading of this volume, I longed to find my own place, research, and intellectual aspirations represented in the community imagined by Gilly. Gilly sent Ginzburg’s essay to Marcos in the hopes that they might share a revolutionary interest in Ginzburg’s argument, which distinguishes two paradigms of knowledge: an informal one based on quotidian , sensual experience and a formal one based on abstract thought. According to Ginzburg’s scheme, historians depend on the first, an experiential type of knowledge in which conjectures are formed from “clues,” or the apprehension of material traces or tracks. Gilly adds that revolutionaries, too, work within this experiential paradigm of knowledge so richly historicized by Ginzburg. Gilly himself had learned, in his own political experiences, to follow the experiential knowledge of Argentinian workers, Bolivian miners, Chilean steelworkers, Peruvian textile workers, Cuban workers, Guatemalan peasants and armed rebels, and Mexican political prisoners, electricians, and students.3 Now it would seem that, via Ginzburg’s essay, Gilly would like to see the work habits of his revolutionary life converge with the work habits of his life as an activist historian and political scientist, inasmuch as both historians and revolutionaries pay attention to the concrete particulars of individuals and their combinations of formal and subaltern ways of knowing. He hopes that Marcos, upon reading Ginzburg’s essay, will see himself engaged in a concrete and intuitive art of political knowing, that he will see the “problematic of Ginzburg’s essay” as pertaining to the experience of all the Zapatistas and, in particular, his own (“la problemática del ensayo . . . tiene mucho que ver con la experiencia de ustedes allá arriba, y en particular con la tuya”).4 He even goes so far as to see Marcos’s ways of knowing reflected in the sixteenth-century conceptual practices of Menoc- Mexico City, the Mountains of Chiapas, Bologna, Friuli, and Los Angeles | 81 chio, whose subaltern cosmology, derived in part from printed books and learned environments, ultimately grew, according to Ginzburg, out of...