IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 81

When researchers attempt to find
answers to them, uncertainty, statements,
and people refuse to answer them, make
it much less likely there will be a quick
solution that concrete numbers of
answers would seem to offer due to their
apparent simplicity. If one can assume
that the divide between nature and
culture happily results from the process
of see humans as less biological, since
they are cultural beings, the problem of
dividing between number and culture
remains. Their correlation or lack thereof
can be inferred in (un)certain results.
Thus, the absence of an explicatory
framework for understanding its
(political construction), as occurs in
population surveys, confers a sense of
realism to the numbers that makes them
essentially real. Quantifying the social
does not exist without some theory to
support it, a method to construct it, and a
representational policy to endorse it.
Any reading of it is not derived from its
essence: the usual example is the
interpretation of a glass being half full or
half empty. Broadly, or a least in the
case at hand, quantitative seduction
persists regardless how often these
issues are brought to light. Since not
everything can be reduced to numbers,
they do not have the ability to explain
hardly anything unless they are not
contextualized, problematized,
and
relativized. Absolute numbers, relative
numbers, percentages, averages, and
lesser-known tools, like the Chi Square
and the Gauss Square, camouflage
numerical majorities and minorities.
After they are enunciated, the cultural is

open to all kinds of interpretations; they
are often unwarranted, which is when
researchers curse for having rushed to
create a question with an incorrect key.
This dilemma is no less problematic for
Afro-Argentines, who having endured a
recent ethno-genetic process are trying
to become visible in greater society and
formulate just these sorts of questions.

A population census as a tool for
State control
According to Benedict Anderson (1993),
a census ends up being used by the State,
just as is the case with museums and
maps, by controlling the symbolic, to
achieve the imagined community, by
amalgamating the symbolic with the
nation. ‘Thus, the census, map and
museum’ analyze the way in which the
nineteenth-century Colonial State, and
the policies its mentality favored,
subconsciously and dialectically created
the grammar of nationalisms, which
emerged later on to combat them. In
fact, we could even say that the State
imagined its local adversaries…way
before they came into authentic,
historical existence. The abstract
quantification/serialization of people
achieved by the census, the logoization
of political space due to maps, and the
‘ecumenical’
and
profane
genealogization of museums made
intertwined
contributions
to
the
formation of these images (Anderson
2000: 14-15). In Argentina, population
censuses go back to the colonial period
(known as the pre-statistical period) with
Juan José de Vértiz y Salcedo, Viceroy
of the River Plate, and the 1778 census.

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