I really liked the Campbell reading, especially how it broke down the murals in terms of their historic significance and their implicit symbolism.  The following are some of my thoughts I wrote down as I was reading the passage.

On pages 30-31, Campbell quotes Arnold Belkin lamenting the “fall” of Mexican muralism, saying, “If mural painting is being developed with increasing vigor in other countries, how can we allow it to die here?  Earlier in this century Mexican muralism was an inspiration for the rest of he world.  Now it is up to us to restore that inspiration.”  This idea of creating or restoring inspiration struck me as funny, since inspiration usually seems to me to be something organic and highly individualised.  Fabricating or forcing inspiration misses the point.

I was intrigued by the conflict between Hijar and Ehrenberg over the question of whether H20’s murals were “Mexican muralism”.  Hijar argued that Ehrenberg’s murals took a scientific direction, deviating from the Mexican muralism’s “two basic tendencies” of “institutional muralism and an oppositional muralism integrated to communities of struggle” (p. 32-33) and thus undermining the art form.  Ehrenberg responded by embracing this notion of deviation.  To me, the entire argument seems arbitrary, since it seems to me that murals painted in Mexico by Mexicans should logically be considered “Mexican muralism” regardless of whether they follow the Mexican school or not; getting caught up in the technicalities of defining art takes away from the art itself.

On p. 35 Campbell writes that the text on Diego Rivera “is enjoined mythically by the editors of the collection through a suppression of standard historical points of reference such as a bibliographical data or contextual information for the selected texts.  Hence the anthology positions Rivera and his muralism within the same timeless national cultural space as the archaeological digs and pre-Colombian pyramids on the tourist maps.”  This idea of authors working collectively to create build up an artist who transcends a time stamp is kind of cool but also makes you consider the influence of historical framing in the process of popularizing or highlighting certain aspects of culture.

The quote “there is a salient contradiction between the mural image as monument of an official national identity and that of tendentious re-motivations of national cultural patrimony,” (p.36) resonated a lot with me.  While I agree that there is this inherent contradiction in the government using a symbol of uprising as a unifying national image, the fact that there is conflict embedded in the national symbol of a nation ravaged by conflict is kind of perfect.  Furthermore, the fact that both the people and the government created and defaced one anothers’ murals adds to the perfection in my mind.

Lastly, Vasconcelos’ image of a post-racial society sounds less racist and more aesthetically pleasing the way it is framed in this reading.  When you remove yourself from the details of his writing, it does seem creative to combine the encouragement of the arts and nationalism into one project.  This is not to say, however, that I don’t still take issue with what he wrote in his paper.

Ran out of words/time for Taussig.  Looking forward to class discussion.

Beginning with the Vasconcelos’ The Cosmic Race, the idea of a sort of post-racial society made up almost entirely by his “fifth race” or “Cosmic Race” seems desirable in theory.  To have a society in which people no longer feel the need to distinguish the race of others seems promising for the prospects of inclusion and peace in a society.  Yet, I have a couple with this concept.

First off, while the world may be moving very slowly in a post-racial direction, having a true single fifth race is just too idyllic for me to realistically embrace. I think that abolishing racial discrimination goes against human nature, since the construct of race is so deeply intertwined into various social structures.  Vasconcelos doesn’t really seem to face the feasibility of his dream (also he was writing in the 1920s???).

Second, even if the races were indeed to blend together, I think it would have unintended consequences for cultures and future cultural presentation.  I think the elimination of race would further the phenomenon of the cultural melting pot- an concept popularly associated with American culture.  In the melting pot theory, all different cultures are tossed in together to create one new blended culture with aspects of each “ingredient” culture.  Just as the races would blend together in Vasconcelo’s vision, I feel that culture too would blend together.  This idea of the cultural melting pot is popularly associated with the United States.  While we discussed in class how culture is a multi-faceted concept, in my mind I do associate it somewhat with race, even if subconsciously (that may be just me, I’m not sure).  Whether such a cultural blending would be a bad or good thing I think is up for debate- we talked in class about how some anthropologists may rally for the “preservation of culture” in order to maintain their jobs.

For the Wade reading, I thought that the way he described mestizaje as an “all inclusive ideology of exclusion” that is actually dependent on “the ideology of its excluded others” on page 243 was nicely nuanced.  Also makes me think about the United States, where popular culture has long borrowed from African American culture while the country has marginalized its black citizens (I’m thinking culture mainly in terms of music right now, particularly regarding the development of the Swing Era, rock n’ roll, and rap/hip hop/R&B).