Violence and Fetishism in Chenalhó: Concerning the Modern Sovereign

Abstract

Starting from our fieldwork among the Tsotsil of Chenalhó, a municipality located in the Chiapas Highlands, we explore the possibility of rethinking the violence of contemporary Mexico through the concept of the “Modern Sovereign”, introduced by the African anthropologist and sociologist Joseph Tonda to delimit the multiform but unified power that currently articulates the social in Gabon and the two Congos. By re-examining in detail the case of an irreligious woman with convulsions, we sound out the level of interweaving of four apparently disconnected fetishisms —“native”, capitalist, Freudian, and political—, a phenomenon that characterizes the singular violence propagated in the realm of the Modern Sovereign. At the same time, we evaluate Tonda’s proposal, as well as our attempt to build bridges between at first sight radically disjointed contexts. More generally, we hope to provide a sound basis for embarking on a long-term dialogue with this heterodox thinker, whose ideas allow to put the spotlight on the limitations of the traditional theoretical-methodological frameworks when approaching present-day Latin American reality, more than ever marked by the brutality of colonization and its postcolonial mutations.