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The afterlives of Hugo Chávez as political symbol
Author(s) -
AngostoFerrández Luis Fernando
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12296
Subject(s) - politics , symbol (formal) , parliament , legislature , law , epitome , guard (computer science) , sociology , history , political science , art , literature , philosophy , linguistics , computer science , programming language
In January 2016, the first publicized decision made by the president of the newly installed Venezuelan parliament, Henry Ramos Allup, was the removal of pictures from the legislative premises. In what transpired as a calculated performance, this member of the old political guard was captured on video dismissively instructing removal workers to send pictures of Chávez away to Sabaneta (Chávez's birthplace), or into the rubbish bin. He also commanded the removal of recent representations of Simón Bolívar, disqualifying them as ‘an invention of that mister [Chávez], a crazy thing’. This episode signalled the intensification of an ongoing struggle over political symbols in Venezuela. This article discusses the background and implications of such a struggle, focusing in particular on the figure of Chávez as the epitome of a contested national symbol. The fate of Chávez's corpse, currently located in a mausoleum, is at stake, but also the configuration of the institutionally sanctioned symbolic order with which political actors aim to condition political manoeuvring in years to come.