“Theoretical sketches on Noche de Altares,” by Romi Mukherjee.

The following constitute a series of “theoretical sketches” which attempt, in a non-exhaustive manner to identify and distill some of the key nodal points of the anthropology of the Day of the Dead. For hermeneutic purposes, these sketches ask, in a broad sense, how the festival “speaks” and on the basis of what “voicing strategies.” These symbolic and discursive articulations are then considered against the tensions that characterize both American citizenship and Mexican/Mexican-American/American relations in Southern California.

“The spirits fly around and then…then they just leave:” The Day of the Dead is less a memorial service or means of paying homage to dead ancestors then a site for their temporal re-integration into society. Any given social organism’s “health” is imbricated in the question of what it does with its dead, how it remembers them or symbolically melds them into the quotidian of day to day “living” life.  The death of a member of society reminds the entire society of its fragility and finitude, this being compounded, in the case of the Day of the Dead, by the longue durée of Mexican migration, displacedness, and up/re-rootedness. The altar is a “death technology,” a type of mortuary hygiene technique, and totemic reservoir for energies and the mana of ancestors.  The Day of the Dead, with the aid of its technologies, ritualistically re-deploys the spirit into the existing society in an alchemical process wherein Thanatos is confronted and brought to serve Eros.  In the sacredness of the altar, the sacredness of an eminently social entity, it was clear that death is not profane and, moreover, that the classical binary of the sacred/profane is perhaps arbitrary, incomplete, and far too monolithic. Indeed, death could be brought to serve life.

Altars and Memory-Work: The altar is a total social fact, a material construct erected of everything from wine bottles to ashtrays to the most sophisticated of wood carvings, which articulates psychic, political, historical, and communal myths and narratives. The altar, and the spirit, thus performs a type of “memory-work,” with the material traces of the altar as mnemonic indices which “orient” and “organize” commerorative processes. Memory is thus not a simple psychological phenomenon or “something one does,” but rather a space of agon wherein identity is both constructed and effaced vis à vis its material sediments. “Common sense” is born within the interstices of the altars. Common sense and shared psychic life also form the locus for the ethical, particularly when bound to shared collective representations and material cultures. And while cosmopolitan memory, the infusion of the global into local matter and memory processes, may function as a means of thinking ethics and memory after “sharedness,”  one should not elide how global deterritorializations and circulation also disrupt and destabilize the fixity of territorities, place, and objects thus forcing us to reflect on the possibility of morality and memory without place or locus. Following Claude Lefort, just as democracy may be a non-site, the democratization of memory may also depend on the development of a non-place and non-site, an empty place that maintains a gap between the symbolic and the real. In all of this, the key question remains: “What is an altar?”

“…Saying fuck you to the OC.” According to Gustavo Arellano, the Day of the Dead subtextually launches a protest against Orange County’s systemic racism towards Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. As such it functions as a type of speech, begging the question of the workings of its “grammar.” If the festival is a type of speech, it is not “explicit” in any manner. Rather, the dead are deployed to “take back” space, atmosphere, and the streets revealing the degree to which the Mexican-American community “bargains” or negotiates a politics of recognition through its imagined spirits and ancestors. One could posit that the dead are afforded an agency or a “bargaining power” that has been historically scoured from the Santa Ana community through the course of its development. Hence, they speak in a manner that local community organisers and politicians cannot. Yet what constitutes their leverage and what is the nature of their demands? In saying “Fuck you” to the OC, they also destabilize the doxa of the right in Southern California and do so from a “third space” which is not simply syncretic, but also formed from within a chiasmus of the present and the past, the actual and the virtual, and the living and the dead. The “spirit” may not speak, but within the context of the Day of the Dead, is certainly a political actor.

“Communitarianism Revisited:” The entrenchment and marginalisation of the Santa Ana community is the result of both historical forces of anti-Mexican/anti-immigrant sentiment and also liberal neutrality. The “fuck you” and the folding back onto El Centro as “communal institution” are buoyed by the lack of normative paradigms of strong citizenship that epitomize Anglo-Saxon and American governmentalities. In other words, without a robust notion of “abstract citizenship,” American liberalism lacks a symbolic site for the construction of a post-racial, post-ethnic “people” bound by their respective love of their liberty, their respective equality before the law, and their respective participation in the “general will.” Abstract citizenship does not efface primoridial identity, but effects a transubstantiation of such identity into a transcendental term which guarantees that special interests, corruption, and culturally or ethnically inflected derogations do not roll back equality as a process. This is, of course, not to say that minority groups should not be afforded particular forms of recognition, but rather that such forms of recognition can only emerge with the common good as their fundamental criteria. Lacking such a nexus, American liberalism supports communitarianism, a pejorative term in European republican and social democratic cultures, an affirmative vision on liberal cultures (as evinced in Santa Ana). However, the pressing questions remains the degree to which “community pride” and “communitarianism” do not enforce types of identity-assignation and identity-reification that foreclose the possibility of “real equality” all the while claiming to be radically emancipatory.  Nothing attests to this more than the divide internal to Santa Ana between a slowly gentrifying “bobo” enclave and the realities of the “indigenous” Mexican population. Liberal political glosses, eager to disavow the existence of such a psychic and geographic divide, rally behind the rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism to offer a highly tendentious vision of the new cosmopolitan Santa Ana. The reality is rather one of “peaceful co-existence,” with the latter term referring to economic and ethnic groups living next to one another, rather than in any kind of transcultural modality from which new forms of solidarity can be erected. Multiculturalism and diversity politics are not anti-racisms and indeed, at the basic structural level, they remain incompatible with strong forms of social democratic equality. Indeed, “culture” and “cultural celebration” become new codes for race and ethnicity. The creation of a distinctive Chicano culture, as Walter Benn Michaels would argue, is both a consequence of racism and kind of compensation for it. The problem with the liberal framework, however, is that the quest for equality may be better served when emancipatory politics foregoes its reverence for “race” and “ethnicity” as drivers of equality and recognizes the degree to which these categories become sites where the inexorable crisis of class conflict is refracted, inverted, perverted, and ultimately lost.

Commemoration, Vulnerability, Temporality: The community of Santa Ana tarries with its own finitude and fragility through its “resuscitation” of the dead and their often fractured lives. The event thus affirms that healthy societies are those that recognize their own historical vulnerability and erect their live worlds, rituals, and symbolic live on the basis of such a recognition. Such an engagement, however, does not simply insist upon our collective obligations to the past and to the dead. In contextualizing the Santa Ana community temporally, the past, the present, and the future are brought into continuum and hence, the obligation to the past also presents itself as an obligation to future generations, their lives and their deaths (which one can only hope will be, pace Freud, “good deaths”). As John Barry suggests, such rituals, function as modes of “strategic recollection,” which should, ideally, engender a coming to consciousness of shared values. Barry’s vision, however, is eminently republican and privileges the construction of a historically based citizenry whose community is political rather than ethnic. The Day of the Dead reveals the impossibility of such a political community in the American context and the “need” to compensate for this social-ontological void through the instantiation of the ethnic or ethno-religious community (thus, begging the question of the belonging of spirits themselves). Nonetheless, the Day of the Dead illustrates the dangers of forgetting and the dangers of “presentism.” It confronts the vulnerability that emerges from within a certain type of global ideology that insists on the specificity and aleatory nature of the present. Such a discourse offers no possibility for “temporal reconciliation” wherein the shocks of the present are parried through the awareness if how one’s community, body, and being are imbricated in the past and extending out into the future – where one builds on the projects and “works” of the past and begins projects and “works” that will be taken up by generations to come. There is an intrinsic relationship between the circulation of the spirit of ancestors and sustainability, if the latter term be understood not purely in environmental terms, but rather as an index of psychic, moral, and affective well-being.

* S. Romi Mukherjee received his Ph.d from the University of Chicago where his thesis, in the history of religions, examined the politics of the sacred in inter-war France. He is currently Maître de conférences at Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po)and co-editor of the English edition of La Revue de Synthèse. He is also visiting lecturer in the history of political philosophy at New York University in Paris. Between 2006 and 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (CIR-Paris) where he worked on a series of European Commission research projects (Framework 7) concerning inter alia the French Republic and pluralism, secularism and the return of religion, and collective memory. Since 2009, he has been affiliated with UNESCO in various capacities, most recently as associate researcher in the Social and Human Sciences Sector where he works on issues pertaining to the ethics and anthropology of technology and the question of humanism in the age of the anthropocene. He has published numerous articles, mostly in political theory and the history of religions, and is the editor of  Durkheim and Violence (Blackwell, 2010) The Political Anthroplogy of the Global (Blackwell, 2011) and Social Memory and Hypermodernity (Blackwell, 2012, with Éric Brian et Marie Jaisson). His current research project is entitled “The Trials of Marianne: The French Republic and the Sacred.”