Peripheral anthropological narratives. Argentinean authors in the <i>Handbook of South American Indians</i>

Abstract

During the 1940’, when the Handbook of South American Indians  was refloated, some Argentinean anthropologists were invited to participate in a work that aimed at systematizing the knowledge about the aboriginal communities of great part of the Americas. The small nucleus that constituted the local anthropological community made contributions in a context of restricted spatial margins, and exercised some influence over their methods of studying aboriginal communities in the Argentinean territory. Those local figures were integrated to the international anthropological community, although in an asymmetric way, and were also part of dense horizontal and vertical academic networks  beyond their native country. Thus the analysis of the Handbook  turns to be a tool which allows us to understand the unequal relationships among different academic traditions and also the ways in which several ideas circulated among different national traditions by mid 20th century.