The Lost Theaters and the Bad News Devils: A Profile of Professor David Guss
October 22, 2004
Anthropology is not a dead subject. Nor is it a subject exclusive to exotic people and customs. Anthropology is a vibrant discipline alive in our midst and one only has to look towards the Tufts Anthropology Department to find how. Professor David Guss of the Sociology and Anthropology Department is currently involved in two major projects in Somerville and Bolivia, both impacting their respective areas. This semester he is writing on both his “Lost Theatres of Somerville” project and about social change in Bolivia, particularly in the Gran Poder festival.
The “Lost Theatres” project is what Guss calls a part of a “public anthropology initiative.” The project explores “the history of Somerville’s fourteen movie theatres and the role of these cultural institutions,” according to its website, www.losttheatres.org. Guss pointed out that Professor Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Professor Rosalind Shaw of the Anthropology Department are also involved in such community work. All three members of the department represent a movement in anthropology to share anthropological research with the community so that the community may then use it for its advantage. Such an approach follows the creed of “not limiting one’s research,” according to Guss, and the idea that one should keep finding “new venues for sharing.”
As a part of “Lost Theatres,” Guss undertook developing an exhibit, archive, and website for the project, working from six different grants including a $12,000 grant from the Lef Foundation to document the different theatre sites. A vast number of cultural institutions from the city of Somerville became involved in the project.
Guss said that in addition to the commitment to public anthropology, his work with the “Lost Theatres” stemmed from a long term interest in the idea of a “sense of place and identity.” His political involvement with Somerville as a preservation activist put Guss in the position to embark on the “Lost Theatres” project, enabling him to use both Somerville and Tufts as resources and outlets for his research. Guss said that it is “wonderful to be able to do this in an academic environment where I teach,” an opportunity that caused him to develop a “Theatres of Somerville” course at Tufts, and brought about an academic partnership with Daniel Abramson of the Architectural Studies Program. The two plan to co-teach a course that will look at academic environments and investigate the different kinds of physical environments in which colleges are found. According to Guss, colleges create “false utopias” and a significant sense of place in only four years—a phenomenon he finds very interesting. In the new course, Guss and Abramson plan to have students go out into the Boston area to do ethnographic research and case studies over the course of a few years. Boston is an incredible place to do this research, he found, because of the diversity in the different types of college settings.
As “Lost Theatres” and its other products began “percolating,” according to Guss, his other work in Latin America was put on the back burner, a move that turned out to be beneficial in deepening his anthropological interests there, especially upon his return this year.
In 1994, Guss saw the Gran Poder festival in the La Paz region of Bolivia for the first time. The “Festival of the Great Power” is the largest indigenous Indian urban celebration, taking over the city when it occurs every July. Thirty to 35,000 dancers take part in the festival as members of 32 to 37 dance fraternities that celebrate and dance through the streets. The event is a celebration of the patron saint of La Paz and is a popular religious event that consists of incredible celebration and partying. The event is known as “the runway for the Andes,” a place where all of the new fashions are found. The event is a “giant economic engine,” according to Guss, with costume makers, invitation printers, and renters showing their best. Football contests take place along with beauty contests and masses.
Guss calls the event “incredibly exciting” for all of those involved, including himself, as he and his wife Kate Wheeler became involved in a fraternity as dancers. Guss now even sits as President of the “Fraternidad Diablada internacional juventud,” the Diablos fraternity known as the “Bad News Devils.” Each fraternity meets in a democratic forum called a “congress” with people from “all walks of life,” according to Guss. Such a democratic meeting is significant to the people involved as they tend to come from the “lower rungs of the social ladder,” a fact that usually excludes them from the democratic happenings of the city’s politics.
In previous years, the festival and parade were highly controversial and discouraged by the La Paz city officials. The festival is put on by the Aymara indigenous resulted in the loss of their credibility. Issues over the natural gas reserves in Bolivia (especially in terms of a disputed pipeline through Chile that would ship the gas to California), as well as the military going so far to fire on its own people, prompted the rebellion last October.
With the major political change, the government this year is responding differently to the Gran Poder. Guss went back to march with his fraternity this year, his first time in two years, and noted the response to the “new political dynamic.” He marked a change in the way people looked at their natural resources as well as the government and the citizens embracing more of a “Bolivian” identity. The dance is a major player in this new dynamic, said Guss, because “what is more Bolivian than this new dance?” He said it is now being encouraged and is seen as a “form of resistance to globalization.”
Most fascinating in the anthropological sense is how quickly such social change can take place at such great magnitude. Guss saw the entire organization of the Gran Poder change dramatically over the last two years, with its participants and organizers now more astute and capitalizing on their new acceptance and the decrease in confrontation. The citizens and government are now less confrontational on a whole, said Guss, because despite instability and various coups, Bolivia has been a relatively peaceful country, experiencing less violence and terror than its neighbors. After experiencing it a year ago, the population finds itself afraid of falling back into the violence, and the government is not as confrontational in order to ensure the peace.
Anthropologists like Guss are integral in noting such changes, and his time as the president of his fraternity has aided his research as well. Anthropology as a whole promotes “participant observation” in which an anthropologist is expected to live and work among a group and observe its behavior from that perspective. Guss calls his time as president more of an “observing participant” position, truly being a part of the process and culture yet still observing from the eyes of an American anthropologist. Luckily for Guss, the festival is held on “Holy Trinity Sunday” (the 8th Sunday after Easter), which is a time when Tufts has already ended for the school year. This fact, plus many phone calls, enables Guss to remain so active in his fraternity. He finds that his position gives him the opportunity to sit on “executive sessions” that an anthropologist might otherwise not be invited to and learn from.
What Guss finds most exciting about his time in both the “Lost Theatres” project and his research in Bolivia is his ability to be “able to do so many things in so many different ways.” Through active anthropological participation in both his community here and in Latin America, Guss is in the unique position of being able to learn from the people he studies as well as return something to both his native and foreign cultures.
