Goulet.pdf

Anahí Viladrich
people I have hardly known, and I should not trust, but who greet
meet me as a distant cousin that has finally got back home after
having lost her path. I give myself to them, knowing about their
desperate need to transcend with the help of my compulsive tape
recording of their words, while being also aware that the intensity
of our encounters is as powerful as fragile and volatile. They can
love me and hate me all at once. They may promise to keep in
touch but it is always me the one to blame for our distance. I ac-
cept their patronizing attitude, their taken-for-granted assumption
that it is my fault if they have lost contact with me; their indiffer-
ence when I tell them that I wish I could be there more often. They
don’t care, or they don’t care much, but it is this overwhelming
feeling of being in Buenos Aires even for a few hours, while sur-
rounded by desperate beauties and forgetful souls, the powerful
force that brings me back to them, over and over again. (Tango
notes, October 10, 2001)
The above notes are among the ones that suffered from my own
censorship and never saw the light in my doctoral dissertation. Now
that the rite of passage is over, I have begun to reclaim the genealogic
layers of knowledge, to paraphrase Foucault ( 1984 ), and to bring up
their hidden construction of meaning. From my role of vulnerable in-
sider in my own ethnic minority, I moved to the one of a vulnerable
observer (see Behar 1996 ) as part of my ethnographic coming of age.
The contradictory feelings of sudden euphoria, enchanting relation-
ships, and frustrating misunderstandings I encountered during field-
work are by no means unique. They are shared by most ethnographers
who, after hours of listening and recording a seemingly endless pro-
gression of words, often feel disappointed and taken for granted.
In the following pages, I describe my personal discoveries in the
field, from the original tensions that my position as a tango voyeur
brought along, to my becoming an accepted non-dancing tanguera, a
role that somehow enabled me to mingle with the cosmopolitan tango
scene. I begin by briefly examining the tango renaissance in the last
fifteen years as a global phenomenon that has become a unique pass-
port for Argentine tango artists eager to join the international enter-
tainment economy. Next, I analyze the role of tango as an identity