The sociologist Mills has defined sociological imagination as a specific state of mind of the researcher, which allows understanding of the social structures and behavior of people (Mills, 2000). It is the ability to look at familiar things in a new way, to see the relationship between phenomena and the trend behind them (Mills, 2000). The author of the book “Rubber”, Gaston Gordillo, has experience in social space production, racial and ethnic relations in Latin and South America, human relations and the environment and the theory of effects, which enables him to use sociological imagination and analyze ruins as an important social phenomenon.
Anthropologist Gordillo is confident that the changing role of agriculture in society has provoked an increase in the interest of the scientific community in the study of this area (Gordillo, 2014). Agricultural works have the properties to create ruins as the main consequence of the ongoing transformation of the soil and habitats of people. Ruins can also be called one of the primary negative impacts of globalization by Wolf as a result of the active development of agro-cultural activities. However, it is essential that the author does not hide from sophisticated theorizing, but provides his readers with a rich ethnographic story, part of which is the analysis with the use of sociological imagination (Gordillo, 2014). The result of using this imagination is a book that is innovative and attracts a rather diverse audience.
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Gordillo analyzes the name of the geographical location as a linguistic channel to the past meaning of the area (Gordillo, 2014). His monograph is extremely interesting to scholars, who study the ideas of space and history, their interactions and social production and destruction, with particular emphasis on the criticism of capitalist and modernist views on history and space as a container for disposable people and resources (Gordillo, 2014). The book also contains a reference to the McDonough developments on myths and space, since the study of the ruins makes possible to reveal the true ending of many great places and changes in people's attitudes and affections for these places.
With the help of sociological imagination, Gaston Gordillo has analyzed the afterlife of the ruins through an emotional view of space, which is sensitive to the ability of particular objects to influence living social actors, both through their presence in the materiality of the area, and through the absence and generating them (Gordillo, 2014). The analyzed destroyed sites by Gordillo have different levels of visibility and effective power (Gordillo, 2014). Some of the ruins are known throughout the region, while others are only known locally (Gordillo, 2014). Similarly, some of them generate fears, while others are ignored by society (Gordillo, 2014). However, the majority of the ruins are frequented by local rebels, who for several centuries were strong enough to turn four Spanish cities and many missions and forts into ruins (Gordillo, 2014).
Indeed, these ruins were also persecuted by the violence unleashed by the state, which were quite widespread (Gordillo, 2014). In this regard, today it is the only region on the western edge of the Argentine Chaco without a rural population that is identified as indigenous (Gordillo, 2014). It is one of the reasons why the state and the Church sought to erase the memory of this violence through topographical and affective modulation of what some of these ruins must mean, often with the participation of mass religious processions and ceremonies (Gordillo, 2014). Gordillo’s sociological imagination is quite mindful because its analysis shows that the meaning of a particular type of ruin, human bones collected in mass graves, is more challenging to control from the state because its material form exudes the violence that has created it.
Consequently, in the book Rubble , Gordillo represents his profound knowledge of the sociological imagination of Mills as a tool of critical evaluation of one of the main paths of modernity, ruins. The author uses sociological imagination to display several interrelated themes, which include the destruction of space, the deposition of violence in material and practical texture. An author has also paid attention to modern geography, and the ways, in which ordinary people and institutional actors are attracted and frequented by the presence of ruins. In a broader sense, Gordillo calls for a look at space through a prism, which is more attentive to the material and affective immanence, since these ruins are only the material that have remained after an excess of failures.
References
Gordillo, G. (2014). Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction . Durham: Duke University Press.
Mills, C. (2000). The Sociological Imagination . Oxford University Press.
