31 August 2021. Statues | Complexity

Toppling the statues of the Conquistadores; after peak complexity

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#1: Toppling the statues of the Conquistadores

It’s obvious that there should be controversy about the statues of the conquistadores. It’s just that I hadn’t thought about it until I saw a piece in the art magazine Apollo on the subject.

In September last year, members of the indigenous Misak community in Colombia toppled a statue in Popoyan of Sebastián de Belalcázar (1480–1551), the founder of the cities of Cali and Popoyan, after a short trial. They found him guilty of genocide.

The statue dates from the 1930s, and was put up to mark the 400th anniversary of his victories over the indigenous peoples:

A written statement signed by ‘the descendants of the Pubenenses’ was published after the trial: ‘We declare that the statue erected in the 1930s … when the city of Popayán commemorated the 400th anniversary of the defeat of our peoples under the genocidal Spanish yoke, is part of the symbolic violence which crushed us and put us in a place of oblivion.’

Another statue of Belalcazar, in Cali, was also toppled a few months later, in April this year—among others also pulled down in a wave of protests against tax reform. These included a statue in Bogota of another conquistador, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who founded the city in 1638. In Barranquilla, a statue of Columbus, after whom the country is named, was also brought down.

The Apollo journalist Valeria Costa Kotritsky spoke to a leader of the Misak people, Tatiana Batiller, about the protests:

‘We, as Misak, don’t have anything against statues,’ Batiller says. ‘We have a problem with what’s being represented in public space, which supposedly should be built collectively, but doesn’t encompass narratives that have been silenced. Who remembers Taita Payán, the Misak leader who fought and resisted (the Spanish) for around 20 days and gave his name to Popayán? He’s been relegated to oblivion, like Taita Calamba and Taita Yazguen … but they’re part of ancestral peoples’ memory and we would like them to be present in public space, not only at a material level, but also in public debate.’

As in other places, there’s also contestation about the locations of the statues. The Belalcazar statue in Popayan went up on a sacred site that was razed. And, of course, just when the statues were erected, they weren’t about the past but the present, so that’s true as they are being pulled down:

As Patrick Morales, head of the District Institute of Cultural Heritage (IDPC) in Bogotá, tells me: ‘Indigenous peoples are not only questioning the past. They’re saying “we keep being murdered now”.

(Ivan Argote, from Turistas)

Being Apollo, the article also interviews an artist who has engaged with the issue. Ivan Argote, a Colombian artist based in Paris, has a series of images from 2013, ‘Turistas’, in which he draped Conquistodor statues in materials created by indigenous craftspeople:

So much of the beauty and the wealth of Spain was actually made possible by their colonies, this was my attempt at making a more honest monument, a monument that would show our mixed heritage, and to make fun of these images of power that are somehow obsolete. I called them Turistas, like these Europeans who go to Machu Pichu and wear all the indigenous attire.

#2: After peak complexity

Over the weekend, I had to go back to look at Joseph Tainter’s influential book on the collapse of complex societies, published in 1988. There’s a good summary here. Tainter was an archeologist, and most of his examples are drawn from ancient civilisations. All the same, he succeeds in drawing out some operating principles that seem to have broader application—even for, or especially for, more complex societies.

His model is this:

1. human societies are problem-solving organizations;

2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;

3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and

4. investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns (p.194).

Schematic version of Tainter’s model of collapse, redrawn by Bardi et al. Between C2 and C3 complexity increases, but benefits fall.

Obviously, the fourth largely follows from the other three. The gap in the process is between stages 3 and 4. Societies, he says, solve problems by increasing their levels of complexity—but even when this no longer works there’s a delay in realising this. Tainter’s account goes like this:

(W)hile initial investment by a society in growing complexity may be a rational solution to perceived needs, that happy state of affairs cannot last. As the least costly extractive, economic, information-processing, and organizational solutions are progressively exhausted, any further need for increased complexity must be met by more costly responses. As the cost of organizational solutions grows, the point is reached at which continued investment in complexity does not give a proportionate yield, and the marginal return begins to decline (p.195)

Well, as Tainter himself says, it’s hard to disprove a model of collapse, more so when it is derived from interpretative analysis of ancient societies where the data is, at best, approximate. 

But Ugo Bardi, who has also written about collapse (in his book Before Collapse and in a co-authored separate paper) did some work to model Tainter’s collapse process, and discovered that it held up.

We found that the basic concept proposed by Tainter, diminishing returns, can be reproduced by the model. But we also found that it is not just the increase in size that reduces the efficiency of the structures of society; it is the combined effect of the higher cost of natural resources and that of having to fight pollution. When these effects are taken into account, the model produces a curve for the diminishing returns of complexity that looks qualitatively similar to the one propsed by Tainter (p.153)

Put like that, it starts to look quite like the ‘business as usual’ case of Limits to Growth, which I wrote about here recently.

j2t#158

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