Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now.

David Staley  0:31  
I'm very pleased to be joined today over Zoom by Michelle Wibbelsman, Associate Professor of Latin American indigenous cultures, ethnographic studies and ethno-musicology in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She also holds courtesy faculty appointments in the School of Music and the Department of Anthropology. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Wibbelsman.

Thank you. I'm really pleased to be here.

Well, and I have to say, I hardly know where to begin, because there's so much that you were involved in. I honestly don't know where to begin, so I'm just going to, at random, say I would like to start with your book called "Ritual Encounters", and I wish you'd tell us a little more about this book and about the argument that you made in it. 

Michelle Wibbelsman  1:17  
Sure. Yes, so "Ritual Encounters: Otavalan Modern and Mythic Community" was published in 2009, so it's been a while. There is a Spanish translation in 2015 that AlterNativas Press that is based here at Ohio State, facilitated, which was really great because it reached a much broader audience. What is the book about? So, the book is about ritual and politics, esthetics and power, festival and ritual practices of meaning making, memory among Otavalan communities, which are indigenous communities in northern Ecuador.

David Staley  1:52  
Tell us a little bit more about this community, please.

Michelle Wibbelsman  1:55  
Yeah, so I started working in Otavalo in 1995. I started with the Tinker Foundation grant, thinking that this was going to be a contained research project over the summer, and it has turned into a lifelong commitment with this community. Otavalo and Otavalans are among the most traditional people of Latin America and also among the most internationally traveled populations, with a worldwide diaspora of well over 70,000 Otavalans all over; any country you can think of Otavalans travel there, with a tradition of this type of coming and going, repeat return migration. It has the largest open market in Latin America and in the continent, and so it attracts a lot of international tourism, domestic tourism. And my focus was primarily on the festivals, public festivals revolving around agricultural practices and agricultural calendars, just looking at sort of the predominance of these festivals and traditions in maintaining this sort of connection. So, one of the arguments that I present in the book is that the frequency of these practices is so pervasive that it's very difficult to separate ritual out as sort of time out of time as it's often been captured by certain authors, and that it really is something that blends into everyday sort of experiences. Some of the festivals that I study are the Inti Raymi festivals, which are the festivals in the summertime connected to the harvest. During this time, there is a ritual battle in some of the communities where I work that's known as the Tinku. It's a practice that appears throughout the Andes, but in this case, it is a counter conquest, a sort of tradition reinscribing the history of the conquest with a twist, where the indigenous people prevail during this festivity. But it also involves a lot of comments on interracial relations in these towns that are often mestizo in the center, with indigenous populations more towards the rural areas, also intra-ethnic violence, so a confrontation of the moieties, the upper and lower moieties, is something that dates back to pre conquest times. 

David Staley  4:16  
What's the purpose of this festival? What's the purpose of sort of reliving or refighting these battles?

Michelle Wibbelsman  4:22  
The folks that I work with say that basically it has to do with a human act of reestablishing balance in the universe. So often in the battles, the dancers say that it's not people who are fighting, that it is the ayas, the spirits, that are basically battling each other and reestablishing this violence in the summer time, this is a period in summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but in this area, we're still in the Northern Hemisphere. The dancers sort of assume this renewed energy. There's an over flow of masculine energy at another time of the year; it is feminine energy that's pervasive. So, there's always a concept of establishing that type of violence on a more pragmatic level. Many of the communities who practice this ritual talk about the practice as a conflict resolution within communities, so communities who have given up the practice indicate that they have experienced more conflict during the year.

David Staley  4:22  
You describe this work as an ethnography, what's involved in ethnography? Are you an observer, are you a participant, are you both?

Michelle Wibbelsman  5:30  
Both, yes. In terms of ethnography, it's about participant observation and extended engagement with the community. So, for my dissertation research, I spent over a year living in the communities, working in the communities, conducting interviews, both short term interviews and then long, extended lifetime interviews. And that relationship continues to this day, so it is an extended engagement, you know, with communities, and I think that that sustained research is what it takes to really understand bit by bit what exactly is being presented and represented in some of these practices. Since then, my research has sort of pivoted. That research was really focused on Otavalo, the site of Otavalo, living there, working there and the communities there, and there's a tremendous amount of diversity in Otavalo. But, as I mentioned, this community is well traveled, with a history, a long history of travel, and so my work now has pivoted towards transnational Otavalan diaspora communities and their experiences in different receiving communities around the world.

David Staley  6:42  
And give us a flavor of where these communities are around the world.

Michelle Wibbelsman  6:45  
Sure, the most common that we refer to are often in Europe, you know, in the United States, but also we see populations in Canada, in Asia, Australia, all over Latin America, pretty much in every continent. But again, it is very difficult to generalize about that migration experience, because each one of those sites sort of generates a different type of cultural encounter and a different type of self representation or imposed ideas about what indigeneity is.

David Staley  7:18  
So, I want to learn a little bit more about your role as Faculty Curator of the Andean and Amazonian Cultural Artifact Collection, which I've been very privileged to have seen.

Michelle Wibbelsman  7:29  
Yeah. So, we were really happy to have you visit, and especially to visit when we had student curators presenting some of the work. So, we've renamed the collection "Kawsay Ukhunchay"; "kawsay" means life, but also culture, there's no distinction between the two in Quechua and in Kichwa, and "ukunchay" means caring for culture with "cariño". "Cariño" is a word in Spanish that really captures the nature of that type of attentiveness. The collection started by way of a purchase with Title VI funds from the Center for Latin American Studies in 2015 and has continued to grow since then. We are very grateful to be hosted in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, we have a permanent exhibit there in Hagerty 255, and I began working with just one student curator at the time; that group has now grown to eight interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate student researchers that carry on a really dynamic research agenda. Now, one of the curious things is we work in the interstices of things, so it's not a class, it's not a center, it's not a museum, it's just a very open ended sort of space. And yet, although there are no requirements for attendance or any type of assignments, the students keep coming back. So, this has been really striking, and the work that they carry out is phenomenal. Each one of them has different research agendas, as I said, we have a very interdisciplinary group. So, some of them come with information and experience in classes on Andean and Amazonian cultures, others are from arts administration, education policy, we have a biochem major. So, it's a very dynamic group. Now, the purpose of the collection that you saw, it's small, it's selective because we are limited in space, but the purpose of the collection is to make a statement about the inclusion of indigenous art as meaning making practices, as sites of knowledge and memory, and, in fact, as text in its own right. So, by way of the collection, we sort of assert that this aspect of recognizing indigenous diversity and to some extent decentering the canon, right, in a department of literatures and cultures, to be more inclusive of other forms of expression. So, not just of indigenous literatures, which have already quite marginalized in history, historically marginalized, but also supralinguistic forms of expression, like material culture, like performance as means of documenting and capturing the experiences of different communities.

Eva Dale  10:20  
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David Staley  10:46  
So, you and I come from the humanities, from departments that value the scholarly monograph as sort of the highest symbol of one's scholarship. Would you describe curating as a kind of scholarship?

Michelle Wibbelsman  11:00  
Absolutely, David. I think that the work that I do with our particular collection, which is an Andean and Amazonian indigenous art and cultural artifacts research collection, is research, is scholarship, absolutely. And I think that the really key thing there is that, by way of these collections, we are able to challenge, decenter, disrupt Western categories of organizing, of categorizing things like this. So, this is absolutely in line with my research on decolonial methodologies. The collection also becomes sort of a playground of ideas. We call it a conceptual open field, where creativity and play open up a realm of possibilities. In Quechua, we call it "pukllay pampa", which is a playground, a field, a playground. And so, in that context of it being a space for experimenting with different decolonial methods, it creates an intersection where the research that we're doing with the collection brings those pedagogies and those practices into the classroom, so it's a really experimental sort of forum. Aside from my research, which is about indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, and the part about ontologies is very important in terms of thinking about object ontologies, the nature of things, in many cases, the agency of certain artifacts, how they act upon the world, right? So, thinking about those things brings out a lot of theoretical and methodological insights. One of the key things about our collection, first and foremost, has to do with presenting indigenous quote, unquote, art, as alternative literacy, as alternative historiography in departments of languages, literatures and cultures that are very focused on text - like you said, on the monograph, on the text and that type of thing - and expanding that definition of literacy and expression, you know, much more broadly to include these really rich forms of documenting local histories, community experiences, things like that. And then, of course, the students - I work with eight student curators - we call ourselves "kawsay waqaychaqkuna", which means those who care for with "cariño", with affection, right, and take care of these items that we have in our collection. And each one of those students has different research projects. They are an interdisciplinary group of undergraduates and graduate students from all different departments, ranging from biology to arts administration and education policy to Spanish and Portuguese, anthropology, and the collection support their research as well. So, through and through, yes, absolutely, collection work and curatorship is scholarship and it is research, and it is uniquely positioned at the intersection of teaching, outreach, research, and also service to the university, because there is a strong component of administrative work in that stewardship as well. 

David Staley  14:17  
It's interesting you use the word care. My understanding is that the Latin root of "curate" means "to care".

Michelle Wibbelsman  14:23  
Yes. We had this deep conversation with students, you know, thinking about why we would challenge that, and I think that part of our brainstorming and conversation has to do with thinking about what it has become, right, in the world of Western art or Western collecting. And so, maybe the different term is just simply to prompt a broader description of that, that ultimately comes back to the original Latin word "to care for", but it forces us to sort of think through, what is it exactly that we're doing? How is this different than just simply hoarding, you know, things? I think that this is a really important aspect of our collection, that we emphasize that we are done talking about indigenous cultures as content, right, as subject, you know, or something like this; that what we strive to do is to engage with indigenous meaning making practices, working with Indigenous artists as collaborators, no longer as subjects of study, right? And so, I think that that shifts a little bit the type of relationship and the type of work that we're doing within the bounds of the institution, right? We still have display cases which pose a huge problem, you know? We try to open them as much as possible, interact with the items as much as possible, to break with the traditional museum practices of, like, looking but not interacting with different things.

David Staley  15:51  
You obviously think that curating is a form of scholarship. Is that how it's viewed in your department?

Michelle Wibbelsman  15:57  
Yes. We had a very important revision of our PNT documents, where the department voted to include curatorship, collection work as research, as scholarship, and beyond that, to think about from a languages, literatures and cultures department, also to include things like performance, you know, as part of what we do in our research, in our teaching, in our service, with the emphasis on research and scholarship. So, that was very exciting, and it was certainly a vote of support for small collections and the unique role that they play at our university in terms of supporting a variety of scholarly endeavors that we carry forth. I should mention, I guess, maybe, that it's not just a local individual thing in terms of small collections, but that we really intersect with the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Grant on multiple fronts. So one our first, our original grant, had to do with bringing artist residents to Ohio State making the point that it is not enough to just have the stuff, that it is really important to work with community partners and engage with Indigenous artists and artisans, right? And then this coming year, the theme for the Society of Fellows is archival imaginations, so this is a huge opportunity for us to make an intervention or to have some input into expanding our notions of archives, of libraries, of what does it mean, like, what are different forms of documenting things? You know, bringing in not just those concepts, but also methodologies that can be cross curricular and applied in different contexts. So, I think that this is a good trend. I don't know if you agree, David, but this is a good trend for small collections in general, in terms of an awareness of the unique contribution that we make here at the institution.

David Staley  17:57  
Oh, yes, very much so. I seem to recall you had a poet in residence or an artist - am I remembering this correctly? 

Michelle Wibbelsman  18:07  
Yes, so we did have a Mapuche artist in residence who does a variety of things: poetry, performance, art installations. And Sebastián Calfuqueo is actually returning for a second residency at Ohio State in a centers collaboration between the Center for Latin American Studies and ACAD, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. So, we're really excited to have Sebastián back. I think that that also highlights the continuing commitment that we have with Indigenous artists, that it's not a one time event type of relationship, but a continuing relationship that we foster over the course of extended time. After Sebastián 's visit, unfortunately, we had the COVID shut down. We were extremely productive, actually, during that time. We pivoted towards online interactions and collaborated on other fronts with a network of artists, and also an institute called Pachaysana, which is a performance based institute and also a provider for study abroad at Ohio State. And now, I'm very excited that in the fall, we have again, the opportunity to bring artist residents back to Ohio State. We have a masked traditions of Latin America, "Dancing with Devils", exhibit that will be a physical exhibit in the Barnett Center, and along with that, we're bringing a mask maker and also a Diablada festival dancer and ethnographer. And another research opportunity research collaboration was with Ati Cachimuel, who is a composer and musician from Otavalo, and produced a book on Andean violin methods. So, the book is published, supported through Center for Latin American Studies and by way of a collaboration with the School of Music, Ati Cachimuel and another violinist who will come to interact with music ed students and then also with, hopefully, performance of an orchestral piece that he composed with the OSU orchestra. 

David Staley  20:12  
Speaking of music, you also serve as director of the Andean Music Ensemble, and I'd like to hear more about this. 

Michelle Wibbelsman  20:20  
Yeah, thank you for asking about that. That is one of the highlights of my week, every week. And it is not a class that talks about Andean music, and we actually perform it, and the class, unlike other ensembles at OSU, has no requirements or no auditions to join, so we have a range of students that go from people who have never touched a musical instrument in their lives to highly classically trained musicians, and they all come together around a small repertoire that we produce every semester. Now, the emphasis of the class is not entirely on the performance perfection, having everything performance ready, it's more of a lab for decolonial methods. This is sort of a testing site for thinking about alternative approaches to language learning, alternative approaches to music learning, often thinking about participatory music making, and elements that we seem to have lost in higher education, which have to do with fun and play. So, I tell the students often that the criteria for getting an "A" in the class is, yeah, showing up and that type of thing, of course, you know, but mostly enjoying, enjoying playing what they can, whether that's hitting one note by the end of the semester or performing an entire piece. And I think that the freedom, you know, to sort of explore and to not have the pressure of like getting it right, but the productive mistakes that we make, and just simply the enjoyment of making music together, actually enables students to embrace the opportunity and to actually learn a lot. And of course, in a more pragmatic sense, you know, by way of the music, it's an entry point into talking about indigenous languages and cultures, so, in that sense, it sort of connects to our programming in Spanish and Portuguese, including our Quechua program and the Andean and Amazonian Studies Minor that we offer that type of programming.

David Staley  22:22  
What sorts of instruments are we talking about in this ensemble?

Michelle Wibbelsman  22:25  
So, we play pan pipes, Andean pan pipes, which are often played in hocket. This is an amazing instrument to demonstrate, sort of, concepts of duality that manifest throughout the culture, so if you have male and female pan pipes, then they have to play together in order to create a melody. We have Bolivian tarkas, which are festival flutes. Both of these instruments are tied to seasons, so this is something that we problematize, that we are not supposed to play the pan pipes during the rainy season, and we are not supposed to play the tarkas during the dry season, because the tarkas call the rain, they celebrate that, that particular time of the year. So, we talk about these issues, you know, thinking about not just representing the music, but also the fact that musical instruments and music in general are considered to have agency in the Andes, they do something to the universe, to the community. And then, of course, we have a series of percussion instruments ranging from a bass drum to handheld goat's hooves. The goat's hooves and any type of rattles, really, throughout indigenous Latin America are considered to open the time spaces. So, by way of this instrument, we can talk about indigenous cosmologies much more broadly and conceptions of time and space. And then, of course, we have other wind instruments and string instruments. One of the most attractive string instruments is the charango, which originally was made out of an armadillo shell, and it has a variety of techniques for playing. So, we work on breath techniques, we work on strumming techniques, we work on percussion and, of course, singing in not just in Spanish, but in Quechua, Kichwa, and Aymara, you know, as languages that are throughout the Andes.

David Staley  24:11  
So, I introduced you as Director. Does that mean... does that mean you're the conductor?

Michelle Wibbelsman  24:17  
Yes, but in a way - this is something we talk about in the group - in Andean ensembles, one, there's no notation, there's no real keeping time, like we just all start and somehow the time just happens. This is disconcerting for students who are trained in a more formal musical tradition. In Andean music, there's what we call a guia, right? A guide, and the guide is eventually not necessary. So, sometimes the group will rebel against the guide and go a totally different direction, so there's no, really, a director that is in control and keeping time, but rather just an additional participant.

David Staley  24:58  
I know you also lead the K'acha Willaykuna Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Humanities Collaboration, and I'm very interested to hear more about this project. 

Michelle Wibbelsman  25:09  
Yeah, so thanks for asking about that. K'acha Willaykuna means messages with beauty. I'm the Lead PI, but I am a co-PI with a team of eight incredible colleagues, interdisciplinary colleagues. I think that the model that we've established for our collaboration is very successful, because it sort of keeps that conversation fresh and dynamic among all of us. This is the project that is supported through the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, and that has enabled these artist residencies. We also have, by way of that project, a regular weekly forum that spearheaded by my colleague Richard Fletcher, that is called our "Unlearning Hour", and it is a forum for discussing the colonial methodologies and practices in the classroom, reflecting back on not just learning and thinking from indigenous epistemologies, which is meaning making practices right, but also reflecting back on our own processes and our need to sort of unlearn, or at least problematize, some of our habits, you know, some of our institutional practices, in the classroom, in our pedagogies, in our research, in fact. So, sorry to throw all these different terms, but I, as I was encouraging, one of our positions is to get indigenous language, include indigenous language within the regular discourse of the university, so that it rolls off the tongue eventually, at least. So within that Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Grant, we have a working group that is the Kawsay Ukhunchay Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Cultural Artifacts Research Collection; this is a very dynamic group that sort of feeds in. We also have other working groups that have to do with knowledge equity and the libraries, and we have colleagues in libraries who are also part of that team.

David Staley  27:08  
Well, and thank you for your kindness, for overlooking my poor pronunciation. I'm curious to know how you came to the study of indigeneity. I mean, of all the things that one could study, why this topic?

Michelle Wibbelsman  27:21  
Yeah, so, you know, in hindsight, I think I can create sort of a coherent picture of my trajectory, but I think, you know, David, that things often happen in a serendipitous sort of way, and that openness to just accepting invitations walking through doors is something that I learned from folks in my field site, always sort of willing to take an opportunity, take a risk, engage in a conversation. I grew up in Ecuador during a period of time where mestizaje was a national policy, our education... oh, so mestizaje, yes, mestizaje is sort of like a blend of indigenous and European, and I think that many of the newly formed nations, right, and democracies, were sort of emphasizing this idea of blending, you know. In Mexico, this took root as, like the cosmic race, a very celebrated concept; in Ecuador, perhaps a little bit more problematic, right? And in the end, in practice, what that meant, in terms of my experience, was that in the classroom, it was very focused on the urban, very focused on the Mestizo culture, very oriented towards the United States and European cultures, and completely ignoring the indigenous reality of our country and the ethnic diversity of our country. So, that is the context in which I grew up, and thanks to some of my mentors in graduate school, I went back to my own country in 1995 to Otavalo for the first time, and I discovered a country that I really didn't know very much about. And I think that once I experienced, you know, the indigenous culture in my own country, that was it. I was definitely going to keep coming back, because it creates a sort of reflection about my own identity, my own family, you know, like, what are the types of social and racial and political issues, you know, that we have, even within our own families, you know, in relation to some of the indigenous realities in our countries? I don't know if that answers the question exactly, but.

David Staley  29:36  
Oh no, it does, and tell me if my perception is correct: I have a sense that there are a number of people at Ohio State that are studying what we might call indigenous culture, and in fact, I feel like I've met some of these folks around some of the events that you've curated. Is my perception correct?

Michelle Wibbelsman  29:53  
No, you're absolutely correct. I think that we have several colleagues that are working on these topics, these themes. I think that the scores of diversity and inclusion, equity and racial justice have also opened up a space for more of this type of work, and it's an exciting conversation, and not just a conversation among Latin American colleagues, but also in terms of a hemispheric discourse, you know, and sharing of that conversation with colleagues that work on North American indigenous studies. Another aspect of that, I was just invited to a conference at UC Merced, and it is on indigenous global Latinidad, no, but also, what is the indigenous component of that Latino and Latinx landscape, you know, as it changes, because in those studies, also, I think that the indigenous has been sort of subsumed in those discussions. So, yeah, so very exciting conversations. I think that point of insertion, we have an opportunity to inform and participate in broader discussions of diversity and inclusion, in particular, underscoring that it's not just about including content on indigenous cultures and creating awareness you know about those cultures, but engaging with some of those frameworks, of understanding the organizing frameworks, right? And one of the points that we make within the collection is precisely, you know, that if we attempt to include some of this indigenous art under frameworks of storytelling and written text, then we're missing the point. We really have to challenge what indigenous art as epistemology, as meaning making practice, it brings to theoretical and methodological sort of interventions, and I think that there's a richness there that we certainly continue to explore.

David Staley  31:43  
Tell us what's next for your research?

Michelle Wibbelsman  31:46  
Yeah, so what's next? One, emerging from the pandemic, finishing my book on musical diversity among Otovalan diaspora communities, so, that is definitely on the agenda. And maybe more immediately, we've received an invitation from the Drake Institute to create a short course based on some of the pedagogies that are emerging from our experience with the Andean and Amazonian collection, and we had been looking for pathways for methods amplification. And so, this opportunity is really welcome, you know, because it allows us to sort of make that point of thinking about indigenous practices, indigenous art, and not just in the context of language and culture departments, right, but in terms of what they bring to cross curricular sort of implementation.

David Staley  32:39  
Michelle Wibbelsman, thank you.

Michelle Wibbelsman  32:41  
Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure talking to you today, David.

Eva Dale  32:46  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer. produced by Doug dangler. I'm Ava Dale. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai