24 July 2023
# Merodeo, merodear, merodeando
Per the dictionary, first-person singular (“yo”) present indicative form of *merodear*. Merodear in English is *to maraud.* In colloquial usage the two words are not perfectly translatable (according to my experience). In Spanish, the negative associations with the word are more ambiguous and tenuous than in English, where I believe the word is understood to imply a violence, insofar that the person using the word usually accuses the marauder of piracy and plundering by force or coercion.
## From [Oxford’s Etymology Dictionary](https://www.etymonline.com/word/maraud): maraud (verb)
1. “to rove in quest of plunder, make an excursion for booty,” especially of organized bands of soldiers, etc., 1711, from French *marauder* (17c.), from Middle French maraud *rascal* (15c.), a word of unknown origin, perhaps from French dialectal maraud *tomcat,* echoic of its cry.
2. A word popularized in several languages during the Thirty Years’ War (Spanish *merodear*, German *marodiren*, *marodieren* “to maraud,” *marodebruder* “straggler, deserter”) by punning association with Count Merode, imperialist general. Related: *Marauded*; *marauding*.
## De la [RAE](https://dle.rae.es/merodear): merodear
De merode y -ear.
1. intr. Vagar por las inmediaciones de algun lugar, en general con malos fines.
2. intr. Dicho de una persona: Vagar por el campo viviendo de lo que coge o roba.
3. intr. Mil. Dicho de un soldado: Apartarse del cuerpo en que marcha, a ver que puede coger o robar en los caserios y en el campo.
## Imprecision
*Merodear* is a term without precise methods, which is why I take it up. It refers to an uncategorized and unchartable movement in space, like Tarkovsky’s [*Stalker*]( https://www.criterion.com/films/28150-stalker). The subject that is *merodeando* is *suspicious* and arouses suspicion *in* their movements themselves; it is a performative method of archiving a landscape. Bodily animation, including stillness, like the stalker’s pauses to study the invaded space, are continuous with additional elements that could be examined or understood as also arousing suspicion: shape, gaze, artifacts, costume, etc.
Merodeo produces anxieties of many kinds: anxiety about property and its possession and its very own (il-)legitimacy; anxiety about seeing and being seen, or surveilled; anxiety about method or the methods own methodicalness, or methodological consciousness; anxiety about time or whether one is, or the suspect is, moving at the “wrong” pace, straggling behind, not strictly minding their “own” business; anxiety about space itself, as in how the prowler or the marauding subject moves at poorly marked or undefended or indefensible edges or excesses of space; the margins where vision is limited or perceivability itself frays apart.
In my Spanish-speaking life, we use *merodeo* colloquially as a sly social practice, such as when you’re watching out with one eye to be on a path, but with the other eye, you’re looking out for trouble (in order to light something up). Such lit practice could be of a sexual nature, “on the prowl,” *or it might just look that way,* without any conscious effort. Or one could be looking for danger, to get into trouble. Merodear can mean to scan around with one sense (i.e. eyesight or listening) while doing something else with one’s body, so that one is discreetly, or less-than discreetly, blending into surrounding activity, like dancing in a crowd but studying the environment at once.
Dictionary definitions add a twist I wasn’t aware of; the origins of the word in military history. The marauder can be a deserter or a straggler; a deviant soldier not quite keeping up with orders, but not quite committing mutiny either. I want to search more on the Thirty Years War and merodeo.
Merodear implies an improvisation, but not pointless. It is a survivablity tactic, but not quite being too busy to survive - why would one want to live to ontologically occupy the space of being tired - sacrificing life for a whole wage. Or it suggests surviving but avoiding exhaustion. Like [nibia pastrana santiago](https://movementresearch.org/publications/critical-correspondence/xandra-ibarra-in-conversation-with-nibia-pastrana-santiago) says:
“what I wanted to say is that I was always aware, especialmente in improvisation, of how opportunities of not-being-that and/or exhausting myself to-be-that served simultaneously to challenge and fail the tourists’ gaze, osea el gaze del audience(…)”
Which is to suggest an evasiveness of the colonizer’s watchfulness and expectations. Like the deserter, the marauding subject might be working out issues with, or working from a point of *being or having been* exhausted. It is studiously unmethodological. It means one is loitering with no precise goal (which is not the same as not having any goal whatsoever); no *known* productivity, within givens. The marauder drifts through space and lives by scavenging. Merodeo is not outright disobedience, but it is an avoidance, one could say.