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2. Illness and Utopia in Severo Sarduy’s Pájaros de la Playa
- University of Virginia Press
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2 Illness and Utopia in Severo Sarduy’s Pájaros de la playa Whether a social fact rooted in the body or a biological fact inscribed in society, illness transverses most of the threads that weave each individual’s relationship to his surroundings, to the universe that makes him and destroys him at the same time. —Jean Benoist, “Santé, maladie: Pour une anthropologie ouverte” If the literary imagination in fin-de-siècle Caribbean culture uses the symbolic malleability of the body to stage a theoretical intervention in and against the absence of history, the work of Severo Sarduy can be said to be postcolonial avant la lettre insofar as the metaphorical vulnerability of the body to social and cultural semantic processes has always been at the very center of his aesthetic project. In Pájaros de la playa, Sarduy’s last and posthumously published novel, physical fragility is taken to the extreme as it confronts the metaphorical administration of cultural identities—metaphors that, as anthropologist Jean Benoist suggests , have the power to sustain as well as to destroy social structures. In ways that will become clear in the discussion that follows, Sarduy’s Pájaros is especially well suited to an analysis of illness as a form of vulnerability , since it treats, through a highly self-conscious aesthetic process, the devastating effects of AIDS. As medical anthropologists have been arguing for some time, no illness surpasses AIDS, the postmodern illness, in its ability to destabilize and reconfigure the meanings we ascribe to the body; in this respect, AIDS has “natural” subversive capabilities. Almost a year after Severo Sarduy died of AIDS in Paris in June 1993, the Laboratoire d’Ecology Humaine et d’Anthropologie of the Université d’Aie-Marseille III sponsored a conference on the then still relatively new illness (Benoist and Desclaux 1996). At the conference, the participants (a group of anthropologists that included Jean Benoist, Gilles Bibeau, Michèle Cros, Dominique Durand, and Bernard Champaloux) discussed issues such as the cultural premises that sustain modern medicine, the social construction of risk on the basis of racist and homophobic criteria, 64 Illness and Utopia and the social management of AIDS, including techniques of confinement of HIV-positive patients and of other individuals belonging to “high-risk” groups. They also discussed the differences in research methodologies, treatment regimens, and modes of transmission between first world and third world societies. Most anthropologists agreed that the global development of AIDS and the uneven distribution of resources have turned the third world into a social laboratory, the grounds for which were morally questioned, though methodologically justified.1 Dominique Durand, one of the conference participants, went so far as to declare that AIDS is a “progressive illness” because, first, it has sanctioned the use in everyday language of words that used to be taboo (words such as “condoms” and “anal intercourse”); second, it has made visible a sector of society that used to be relatively invisible (heroin addicts, for instance); and third, it has contested notions of legitimacy given the fact that it has exposed the extreme porosity of the borders that separate center and margin in relation to private sexual practices. AIDS can also be considered “progressive” because it has led anthropologists to examine their own discipline. The discussion on AIDS in this conference led panelists not only to consider the possible misuse of their findings by governments and institutions of social control but also to reconsider the assumptions underlying that anthropological fieldwork, in particular the techniques of observation, often described as a voyeuristic practice, that make the discipline possible in the first place. Indeed, the anthropologists participating in this conference were almost unanimous in their admiration for the work accomplished by gay communities in the United States in relation to the study and understanding of AIDS even though—or precisely because—the researchers were not anthropologists. In so doing, they accorded priority to personal experience over the methods of their discipline. As a result of the disciplinary questions raised by AIDS, the conference participants were forced to question the very notion of culture that traditional anthropology entertains. Rather than defining a culture as a sum of behaviors and beliefs that are observable and ultimately decipherable, anthropology would now have to think of culture as a process that takes into account the complex cognitive contexts that define human behavior. According to Gilles Bibeau, individual behavior takes place within collective processes that limit the decisions that individuals can make (1996, 19). It...