Image, Childhood and the Political Appearance
Greta Winckler
contact: gwinckler[a]filo.uba.ar
Abstract
Studies on childhood and infancy gained vital momentum in the 1960s, especially from the pioneering work of Philippe Ariès in France and for Western Europe. This question about a “feeling of childhood” was supported at that time by a fruitful journey through the iconographies of children that animated the history of European modernity. Even without having a theoretical framework on the image, Ariès found in the pictorial field, fundamentally, a line of entry to reflect on the status of boys and girls in Western societies. That is to say, it is in the face of the image that a theoretical proposal was developed that drove reflection in the field of the humanities. Three centuries earlier, a Czech pedagogue to whom we still return, Johannes Comenius, understood the formative processes - especially for children - as eminently sensitive, rather than merely intellectual. This proposal, embodied in his Orbis sensualium pictus (17th century), implies a double reflection: on the one hand, the capacity of the image to impregnate and leave a mark; on the other hand, the beginning of a thought that is still hegemonic today: boys and girls are malleable blank slates, especially sensitive to images and their possible manipulation. These imaginaries continue to operate and in the Argentine case they are strongly anchored in the political and symbolic tradition of Peronism, a mass movement that emerged in the 1940s and reinvented itself in later periods, including the present. The denunciations about the indoctrination capacity of Peronist imagery recover the power of the visual (and the fear it produces), as well as an impossibility of thinking of children outside the adult-centric paradigm that places them outside of decisions about their own lives. Mainly, they are stripped of their political agency and fundamentally of sovereignty over their own image, which is always underexposed (in the terms of Georges Didi-Huberman) because it is invisible, or overexposed because it is consumed as a spectacle. In this question about the possible (political) appearance of childhood, fieldwork is carried out in social organizations in the southern area of the Buenos Aires suburbs (Argentina), but focusing attention on a sensitive configuration of politics that, rather than fearing the agency capacity of the image, makes it part of theoretical reflection and daily praxis. The images of the groups with whom the fieldwork is carried out - so dear to anthropological work - are neither illustrations nor secondary artifacts, neither in the field of research nor in that of militancy for an alternative educational project. Images are the driving force of thought as well as a political proposal, and it is with, by and through them that we can recover and dismantle the models and figures that allow us to understand how the links between adults/children are articulated. With a working method that recovers the film tradition of Anglo-Saxon Visual Anthropology, as well as a Warburgian line of analysis -which is part of German Image Anthropology-, we unravel how popular childhoods are exhibited, as a political praxis and under visual strategies -more or less planned- that are based on long-term pathetic formulas.
Publications
“Gestos iconoclastas. Regulación del orden visual de las infancias: el caso de Zamba” en Imágenes en tránsito.Acciones y procesos. María Elena Lucero , coordinadora. UNR Editora, Rosario. 2019
“Fórmulas de infancia: niñez romántica, niñez combatiente” IX Jornadas de Investigación en Antropología Social Santiago Wallace. GT 5: Antropología de la Cultura Visual -Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad de Buenos Aires. 2018
“Imagen e infancia: una configuración visual de la niñez” en Políticas de las imágenes en la cultura visual latinoamericana. Mediaciones, dinámicas e impactos estéticos. María Elena Lucero, coordinadora. UNR Editora, Rosario. 2017
