Estudios Sociales del NOA

Antigales, cairns and unkuñeros. Significant alterities and relationality in the community of Queta, Puna de Jujuy

2025-08-20T15:43:00+00:00

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on Andean ontologies, through the analysis and ethnographic exploration of ritual practices in the Puna of Jujuy (Argentina), trying to understand the way in which its inhabitants relate to their environment, which they usually refer to with the term pacha. To this end, the study proposes the identification and characterization of certain significant othernesses —antigales, apachetas, unkuñeros— with which the people of Puna interact through their domestic and community rituals. In order to illustrate the type of links that are established in this region between humans and non-human others, observations and stories obtained during a field experience with families from the aboriginal community of Queta, in the Cochinoca Department, are recovered. These Andean conceptions of time-space, of the world and its existents, will be intertwined with the theoretical conceptualizations of relational praxis of K. De Munter and the multinaturalist perspectivism of Viveiros de Castro, understanding that this dialogue can contribute to the vindication of otherness and other thought as drivers for the ontological opening of anthropology, allowing us to overcome epistemic boundaries through a critical and radical review of the principles and axioms of Western naturalism, profoundly questioning modern concepts about the nature of being and reality.

Lo indígena como origen, identidad y destino del Chaco

2025-08-20T15:43:02+00:00

This article analyses the figure of the Chaco sculptor and writer Crisanto Domínguez (1911-1969), paying special attention to his literary production. It seeks to reconstruct how Domínguez’s production is inserted in the incipient cultural space of Chaco at the end of the 1930s, and in what way can be found in his work representations that pretend to account for the “Chaco identity” in connection with the indigenous legacy. It also analyses the controversial case of the “Monumento al Indio” (Monument to the Indian), made by Domínguez in 1938, commissioned by the municipality of Resistencia, investigating the situations that led to this monument being “castrated”, removed from the public scene and finally disappearing, without the place where it was buried being known. The work thus recovers the specific modulation with which Domínguez thinks the indigenous from the Chaco, facing at the same time the problem of constructing a regional identity that articulates the different legacies of creoles, immigrants and indigenous people, aiming to overcome the historical stereotypes with which this territory and its population have been considered.

Pseudoarchaeology and Politics in Jacques de Mahieu

2025-08-20T15:43:04+00:00

The French intellectual Jacques de Mahieu (who was linked to the collaborationist extreme right in France, and close to Peronism when he migrated to Argentina after the liberation of France from the Nazis) introduced a particularly reactionary inflection within the interdiscursive debate on the role of archaeology in the definition of continental identity, by deploying the hypothesis of a pre-Hispanic conquest of the continent by the Vikings and the Knights Templar, who would have reached even the Argentine northwest, thus being responsible for all indigenous civilizational achievements. This paper focuses on the essay El imperiovikingo de Tiahuanacu (The Viking Empire of Tiahuanacu, 1985 [1982]), considering some points of contact between de Mahieu’s thesis and the previous esoteric speculations concerning the American romantic Indianism and its derivations linked to Nazism. At the same time, this paper establishes a dialogue between the ideas implicit therein on social, cultural and political dynamics with the reflections of this same author on biopolitics and the “organized community”, elaborated in previous decades.

On La ópera chola, or Bolivian popular music as a mirror of the nation and collective identities

2025-08-20T15:43:05+00:00

Bolivian popular music can be considered one of the most significant cultural phenomena produced in Bolivia in its nearly 200 years of existence, and the same can be said of the dances associated with it. In the conjunction of musical, festive, and ritual traditions of pre-Hispanic societies, colonial society, local processes, and foreign influences of the 19th and 20th centuries, popular music in Bolivia has become a mirror of the nation and the collective identities of recent times: a mirror, insofar as it is a privileged space for better understanding and interpreting Bolivian society itself, as reflected in its music, and insofar as it is also capable of giving meaning to collective identities, as well as effectively imagining, representing, and symbolizing what Bolivians dream of being, whether in an imagined past, a legitimized present, or a contested future. Popular music is, as I argue in my book: La Ópera Chola. Música popular en Bolivia y pugnas por la identidad social (La Ópera Chola:Popular Music in Bolivia and Struggles for Social Identity), a battlefield, a symbolic/metaphorical theater of operations where the struggle for the meaning of what Bolivians believe they are or aspire to be is fought over: the ultimate definition of what Bolivia should be in the eyes of the world.

Gracias por el fuego. En memoria de Ana María Presta

2025-08-20T15:43:06+00:00