Interview with Rossana Reguillo

CILA: I'm interested in what you suggest about the social construction of fear. Tell me about this work and this theory.

R.R.: Over the last three, almost four, years now, starting from an intuition that came out of my own previous research, I understood that we needed to study how the new mechanisms of fear were being produced in our society in order to truly understand certain forms of interacting, certain forms of communication and above all daily life, the day-to-day events in Latin American societies. From there, through a combination of questions that I could relate if we had enough time, I began to consider the need to study fear as a mechanism of social and political control, based on the hypothesis or premise that whoever manages to appropriate our fears will be the one who defines the social agenda of the Twenty-first century.

Based on this premise, I attempted to set up a comparative study - which is to say, a study that would allow us to understand through different histories, different cultural traditions in Latin America, how people position themselves in regards to these new axes of fear. I chose therefore to work in Colombia, Puerto Rico, Argentina and Mexico, focusing on the very simple, but very complicated idea of setting, since the forms of State presence, of the National Government, redefine the ways in which a society experiences it own fears. We have the authoritarian and paternal government of Mexico, an omnipresent State which the Mexicans feel in their very skin, it is such a strong presence; the collapsed State of Colombia, a State which has imploded upon itself, a broken State; the authoritarian State of Argentina with its history of dictatorship; and the absent State of Puerto Rico, a State which exists and at the same time does not really exist.

From this point, I began my work, and I have been finding very interesting things all over the continent in regards to how fear has become a new articulator of society. I'm at the point now of concluding this big comparative study and I'm convinced that trying to touch these fears has allowed me to understand very profound questions regarding Latin America and very profound questions regarding how our societies function.

CILA: Is it the mass media of communication that have transformed the reasons we feel fear?

R.R.: I think media of communication play a key role in the construction of fear, above all in the expansion of all the terrible stories that assail us, but certainly not the only role. I have a deterministic perspective. I don't think exposure to the media produces more or less horror, but I do think that the media has at this point become a fundamental mechanism for increasing the visibility of certain key social aspects, and that these aspects highlight deterioration, chaos and problems.

What I have tried to highlight myself is how the media underline, emphasize and make available to us the perfect rhetoric, examples and discourse with which create a deteriorated view of Latin Americans as political beings.

CILA: Does this also erode the perception that others have of Latin America and in what way?

R.R.: I think the answer is clearly yes, and I am going to refer here to the case of Colombia. I think Colombia, with its accelerated crisis of recent years - which is, of course, not a new crisis - is very impressive. It has never ceased to surprise me that Colombia is the only country in Latin America that has a large period of history known as La Violencia (The Violence) in capital letters. This is very powerful.

Beyond the questions of a historical nature, which have to be considered carefully in any analysis, I think Colombia has been converted into an example of the worst horror by the media. It has spread throughout all the globe at a very fast rate that Colombia is fundamentally an exporter of violence, of chaos. And that this violence is incorporated into the inhabitants themselves, in such a way that the media can even use simplifying and stigmatising metaphors such as "colombianización."

This metaphor of colombianisation refers to the risk that other countries will be contaminated by all the terrible things that are happening to the Colombians. This is very serious. It's serious because the Colombian people, real people of flesh and blood, incorporate these global lessons about themselves, and go about positioning themselves in the public space in such a way that they feel obligated to say: "yes, I am Colombian, but I'm not a drug trafficker" or "yes, I am Colombian, but I am not a guerrilla or an assassin or a terrorist."

This undermines the processes by which we know and define ourselves and mollifies the global imagination that views us in such a way. Of course, Colombia is the paradigmatic example, but it's not the only one.

A very strong example happened a month ago - this by way of a personal story - in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. In the context of the European Summit that brought government leaders together in Seville, I was assigned to follow the press coverage. I was in Malaga at the time and was deeply surprised by a press report regarding the assassination of a pair of Colombians in the very center of Madrid.

This newspaper, El Mundo, began it's report with: Danger, risk of colombianisation in some Spanish neighborhoods. So, through a process that we could call linguistic synecdoche - the part for the whole - it's the whole nation that becomes the symbol of horror.

My key point is that there is an asymmetrical process at work in how meaning is constructed. The press does not use the term "spanification" to refer to the increase in policies of harassment or prejudice against immigrants, nor does it use the term "hollandization" or "francification" to refer to the growth of the radical right. But in the global imagination Latin Americans have clearly become exporters of violence, chaos, and danger.

CILA: The same mechanism that constructs these negative perceptions can also be a mechanism for social change. How can we harness the potential of communication and the media to achieve positive goals?

R.R.: I think that is a complicated question. We need access to both public space and the control of the narratives that circulate at a planetary level. At this point, I am convinced that an enormous responsibility lies with the journalists - the journalists on foot, the day to day journalists who report on neighborhood events, who write the police report, who write the little color pieces that feed the international printing presses. But above all, the responsibility lies with the television journalists, since I am convinced - and I say this not as a personal opinion, but as an opinion based on careful study - that the only alternative is to place counter-narratives within the big media of communication.

We need to make visible other parts of the Colombian identity, other aspects of the Mexican identity, other aspects of the Argentine identity apart from the current economic crisis, and we need to work carefully to construct representations of otherness, that "other" that since September 11, 2001 has become the representation of the most terrible thing that can happen to us. I think that in that horror there is an important richness, but it is going to be an uphill job to fight against the existing images, since they are incorporated into our very bodies, our very dreams, our very mentalities.

CILA: Now I would like to expand a little on the other parts of your work that pertain to these questions and how it was that you chose to study fear.

R.R.: It's actually a very long story. I've dedicated myself for a number of years to the study of what I have provisionally called the anthropology of events. What interests me is to look at a society at the moment in which it is constructing itself and to follow that event - to follow the way in which societies debate very important and historical issues at moments of key conjunctions. And of course fear is not the end point of my research; for me, it is a useful point of analysis.

It is a way to analyse issues of identity, politics, and culture. Something very important that I have learned through addressing these issues has to do with what I might call the reconfiguration of the public - a reconfiguration of public space (and I say this with much concern) that each time leaves us with fewer opportunities to create or construct a democratic society, to build a society where human rights are a fundamental principal and above all, a society that is stable, fair and content.

In this way, through my focus on fear I have been able to address, for example, the strong role currently played by neo-religions - this idea of healthy or therapeutic environments - which together with other forces, such as drug trafficking and the mass media itself, has produced a draining of the public and a strengthening of the culture of the individual. If this idea that the individual is the epicenter of reality (that the goal is to save yourself and your own community of reference) triumphs, we are going to have serious problems. It will mean that the society of the Twenty-first Century will once again be a binary one of the good versus the bad, where the bad are actually the majority and the good are the few who have political power, economic power, and most of all the power of representation.

CILA: In this context, what do you think about global and local positions of studying reality?

R.R.: I think that in this day and age any analyst that takes himself seriously should focus on what we might call the interface between the global and the local. I think its very dangerous to think that globalisation in its economic sense is a fatal and inevitable destiny, but I think its equally dangerous to assume a localist, rather than a local, perspective - a perspective in which the fundamental thing is to save the small community.

Our challenge is to move at two levels at once. One level is the analysis of structure, which is to say the analysis of the big picture, the statistical analysis. In this day and age, statistics are a fundamental and necessary element of understanding world configurations. But this alone is not enough. Studying the political economy of communication or the political economy of culture is not enough to understand what is happening to us. Its also important to look at the ethnography of daily life, the smaller story. My epistemological and methodological position is this: neither the story without the structure, nor the structure without the story.

We are increasingly required to be very comprehensive analysts, capable of moving within the big planes of global structures. But we are also required to speak easily with Doña Ximena or Doña Francisca of the local barrio, to understand the discourse of the "chamos" as the Venezuelans call their youth, or the discourse of the Petare barrio, an area completely enveloped in the cane thicket of Venezuelan violence. We need to understand the young Darkies or Goths in deepest Mexico who flirt with death daily, and who not only take their reference points from the local imagination, but who are also profoundly connected to the global. I think this is substantively important, and it requires us to be academically and scientifically rigorous, without becoming rigid. As Bourdieu - who has passed away, may he rest in peace - showed us, one should never confuse rigor with rigidity.

Translated from La Iniciativa de Comunicación - click here for the Spanish version.