Pinto, lechugas y óxidos de nitrógeno

Perhaps the first way to cut distance to a subject is to embrace its scale from our own, that is to say, to measure it until finally compressing it into a predictable skein, congruent with the formulas that dominate it, reproducible, encapsulated. But this way of understanding is not very ductile and very allergic to the uncertain.

A phenomenological approach assumes that to understand the lived world, it is necessary to explore the stories people tell of their experiences; to understand and respect these first-order constructs and their interrelationship within their specific logic and the practices in which they are applied.

Listening to stories and gathering them together is a simple approach, but to this must be added their treatment under a methodical sanction, a prowling around them with intention, until finding their connection expressed in theory, within the intentional logical structure of those who produce them, and interpreting them from a theory about them that does not prescribe, but organizes and interprets. And the above does not refer to a documentary exercise, it does not seek to dress up a Shakespearean 5:3 narrative skeleton, it is an exercise with a comprehensive, non-conclusive eagerness: the documentary format owes it, it is a later product. The point is not to produce one more translating document, but to describe in a continuum how a group develops its documents and argues with them.

The importance of adding subjectivities is not in the simple accumulative work, the thing is more grey, because it is about admitting that they count, of how determinant they are from the individual to the collective and vice versa; of how dangerous is the pretension of universality. The construction of maps that include them, moldable in multiple timelines, is a tool that serves not only to the orientation of applied local policies but also to the production of exportable methodologies of “being there”, that accompany the analysis of events for the use of other orders of colder data (what does it mean that x tons of garbage are collected per day? that Mrs Aurelia now sells 5 lettuces instead of 5 boxes of lettuce a day 10 years ago or that the concentration of coarse particles is higher in certain points of a city, that a patent or a building permit is awarded to whom, when and where means).

So seeking questions that generate more fundamental, more appropriate questions about space and those who participate in it, without an improper reductionist zeal, but to identify gaps in the analysis is an imperative (treating one’s own observations not as new certainties, but as starting points for new research theses). In practical and broader policy terms, the above would imply the annulment of the praxis of importation-application of “successful” models in other spaces of experience and under other economic logics. In Chepe it is not produced, distributed, circulated or consumed as in any other place. It is an administrative absurdity to consider that forcing Swedish questionnaires (extreme case) is a congruent tactic; although it may be a foreign exercise worthy of valuing, Swedish sodas do not smell of pinto, nor do they speak Spanish in whose inflexions, for example, one could recognize the leaps between informal work, labour exploitation and slavery. The above does not imply the understanding of space as an isolated entity and completely contrastable to any other, it also forces us to consider inter-spatial processes caused by daily migrations and other flows that affect and determine it.

INEC, Costa Rica´s census and statistical institute, from its mandate, partially assumes subjectivity within the technical limitations of the survey instrument itself. In them it is possible to find questions that begin with how or why (understanding of opinions and motivations), and cells for broader answers, that is to say, they accompany the quantitative questions with qualitative ones to facilitate their interpretation, or to put it another way, to measure the impact of the fact in the subjectivity and inversely (be it individual or collective).

But again, if space is not comprehensively traversed if its erratic character is not accepted; if we stubbornly insist on painting it as unfathomable, hostile to any interrogation outside the knots of numerical data, how can we dare even to doubt the publicized perceptions from the outside, how can we contravene the moral prescriptions or the academic manual that encapsulates it in an artificial common sense? (There are still people who speak in the present tense of the chapulines) Questioning is a performative act that must also be understood as antagonistic to what we narrate to ourselves.

At least as a threshold, an image stimulates the possible from its shortcomings. The image does not contribute much positively: without a foot it does not know what or when it is a chapulin and therefore forces an interrogation in both senses of the photographic experience (Hodge and Kress, 1988). It is empathically a resource that covets the richness of the ordinary and points out that periphery in the centre; without an ideological agenda in its presentation, it detonates the admission of probability in uncertainty. This embodied in an image and our mania to resolve it or at least expand on it, is an exploitable resource in the stages of thesis gestation. To examine its potential, not only as a historiographic apparatus, as a passive referential document, but as an agent of what Estrada calls ‘forms of social and individual habituality’, is to curiosity an ember.

Its use during interviews, although not very widespread, is admitted to be very productive(1) either as a mnemonic stimulus or for the simple resolution of misunderstandings. However, and this is what we are insisting on here, it is also the case when defining the question. By using tactics such as observant participation or mock interviews, exposing the researchers of these spaces and their human groups to material that makes them uncomfortable and stimulates them with questions about a subject and what holds it (both barely suspected), would enable them to adapt to a future zoning, would enable them to adapt to a future methodological zigzag, since an image does not affirm what should be observed, does not argue, but on the contrary, persuades towards that which has not been taken into account, objectively would make them doubt(2) and therefore conjure up interdisciplinary strategies of collaboration and methodological transfer; the opportunity to motivate processes of greater propaedeutic freedom, instead of insisting on bibliographical reviews with no effect on the field. This should be obvious because visiting an image on several occasions and at the wrong time does not lead to repetition, but to an inevitable revision of criteria(3). Looking as reading is an act from the present, and therefore an accumulated opportunity to broaden the understanding. Take as an example of the above its importance for the proposal of identity studies, most particularly those in which the composition and distribution of groups, events and their conflicts are addressed. Reducing people to group labels may in principle sound like an understatement that amplifies their needs, but equally, if one insists on stereotypes and tropes that are often derived, it may further marginalize them from just anonymity in fairness, necessitating long-term critical monitoring of how it is understood and manipulated. As is often the case with quantifiable data, their analysis compromises complex phenomena into perverse dichotomous reductionisms of pretty graphs and artificial zonings that do not represent the complexity of what is happening on the ground.

Questioning widely a point of daily life requires attendance because although at first glance it seems a banal fact, to find yourself at 6 am in front of the incredible pinto of Don René, in his soda of 30 years in the Borbón, should force you to wonder about much more than its price or culantro, why no people are lining up for this pinto; what could A, B, C ask themselves if they at least knew it existed; who eats and who does not, who does not believe they can come and why they do not, 30 years…? These are some questions that Chepe needs to have added.