Fashioning the "New Barbarians": La Pocha Nostra's Reverse Anthropology

Appropriating both the form of the fashion show and the fashion shoot, performance art collective La Pocha Nostra’s ongoing series The New Barbarians interrogates the interstitial relationship between race discourse, anthropology’s historical role in the production of the cultural “Other,” and their diffusion into popular and visual culture. This paper explores two works in the series: the live “fashion show” and the photo-performance portfolio Ethno-Techno: Evil Others and Identity Thieves, 2005, which draws heavily on the visual signifiers of high-fashion photography. La Pocha Nostra enacts a conceptual reverse anthropology in these works, in part through the formulation of performance personas based on their collection of anonymous intimate beliefs and fantasies about indigeneity, and how Mexican, Chicanx, and American Indian people look and act. The role of fantasy becomes a central issue, bringing into focus questions of how aspects of fantasy and photography in fashion and the anthropological aid in a production of difference that is still evident in contemporary visual and media culture. Their performances humorously parody phantasmic images of the “Other” haunting popular culture, but also go further, overloading their ability to coherently signify, and marking them as mirrors reflecting back the emptiness of any notion of Western identity. Additionally, this paper argues that La Pocha Nostra’s synthesis of photography and performance labors to disallow the evacuation of conceptual agency often attributed to both discourses of indigeneity and photographic theory, while reterritorializing conceptions of the temporal and spatial in generative ways.