Yearnings for Guacharo Cave: affect, absence, and science in Venezuelan speleology

摘要

As a member of Venezuela's first national society of cave exploration and science (speleology), Ramon Alberto Hernandez (1926-2009) participated in the exploration and survey of Venezuela's famous Guacharo Cave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite his key contributions to the knowledge of this cave and many others in the country, his contributions have received little attention. With an ethnographic account of his last visit to Guacharo Cave in 2008 as focus, this article offers a glimpse into Venezuela's geographies of science at an important historical moment in the relation among individuals, the nation, science, and modernity. It does so from Hernandez's vantage point, as he yearns to reach a particular point inside of the cavern, a point where his life and the lives of other cave explorers who overshadowed his speleological contributions, the cavern, and my own history become entangled. Building on scholarship that emphasizes absence and hope as important aspects of experience, I focus on this yearning, this emergent, relational, and transformative capacity that animates and constitutes not just these entangled histories and identities but also beings and the cave itself. In the process, I illustrate the ways scientific knowledge and national modernity are co-produced. Beyond Hernandez, beyond caves, this exploration reminds us of the need to (1) examine the ways affective attachments are formed in/with extraordinary places and (2) widen our understanding of materiality and presence to encompass absence. Finally, this work illustrates the centrality of yearnings in fieldwork and writing.