"Autonomy in Apparitions: Phantom Indian, Selves, and Freedom" by Axel César Lazzari

Axel César Lazzari

Deposited 2010

Abstract
In this dissertation I analyze the workings of autonomous selves in the present day reemergence of the Rankülche Indians in the province of La Pampa, in Patagonia, Argentina. Indian reemergence is understood against the backdrop of a displacement in regimes of recognition and power, i.e. from the Phantom Indian to the Return of the Phantom Indian. Whereas the former has produced the Rankülche as vanishing into local mestizaje since post-conquest times in 1880s, the regime of Return, appearing in the 1990s, makes the vanishing Rankülche themselves dis-appear. It is contended that both regimes of recognition help to construct subjects as in need of civilization and self-civilization.

By distinguishing acknowledgement from recognition I endeavor to discover and write about the emergences revolving around Indian reemergence . Acknowledging acknowledgment is pursued by means of writing about, inscribing and (I suspect) being seduced and haunted by fetishes and phantoms, both notions and temperamental attitudes gesturing to the apparitional which interrupt and defer representation and power circuits of equivalence. The general working hypothesis states that in and by the demand of the Phantom Indian to be recognized as the Rankülche indigenous people a critical acknowledgment of the non-correspondence of the demanding subject to the identity and self demanded is entailed. Conversely, the subject granting recognition might not arrive to a reparatory self. Thus, in approaching the regimes of recognition of the Phantom Indian and the Return from the perspective of phantoms and fetishes impasses, ambiguities and ambivalences are hinted at and thereby, I argue, the articulation of apparitional selves at freedom.

The argument starts devising a "parahistory" of the regime of recognition of the Rankülche as Phantom Indians. Censuses from the 19th century and the 2lst century, a symptomatic reading of the "prior to the Phantom Indian" frontier literature, and the many meanders of post-conquest Rankülche trajectories and the present-day Rankülche "Indian movement" are the main focuses of analysis. In the second part, entitled "paraculture," the revitalization of the Rankülche language and the repatriation of a cacique's skull are seen as two paradigmatic forms for staging the regime of the Return of the Phantom Indian. Both, past and present situations of recognition would show evidence of circumstances in which the thrusts of recognition and control are fractured by emergences and autonomic selves. My aspiration is that the perspective developed in this thesis contributes to scholarship specializing in the so-called "new emergence" of indigenous peoples in Latin America.