Representing and Communicating in and from Borderlands: Technological Appropriations by Kolla and Wichí Communities

Abstract

This work reflects on power struggles in public space, understanding that these require increasingly complex communicational knowledge and the development of tactics of appropriation by Indigenous Peoples who are situated on a cultural border, a space of conflictive contact between “Indigenous” and “Western” thought. To this end, they need to appropriate technologies and languages characteristic of late modernity, which postulates new narratives, aesthetics, and values, implying the development of strategies proper to seminal thinking.

The problem will be addressed from a semiotic perspective in dialogue with communication studies, anthropology, and sociology. The aim is also to situate the reflection from decolonial and localized perspectives. To this end, the work of Rodolfo Kusch is reviewed, produced largely in and on Northwestern Argentina, the place to which the Indigenous communities whose websites are analyzed belong. These are the blog of the Kolla Tinkunaku Community and the Facebook page of one of its ayllus, Río Blanquito, in contrast with that of the Wichi Lhayis Community of Rivadavia Banda Sur, both located in the province of Salta.