Beyond “Landscape”. The Space of the Puna and Quebrada of Jujuy: Commensal, Host, Interlocutor?
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Abstract
This essay proposes an approach to Andean space from a critical perspective on “landscape” as a modern historical construction that configures Andean space as an “object” opposed to a “subjectum” (subject), as elaborated by Descartes in the seventeenth century.
The reflection seeks to think Andean space from the perception of the local inhabitants themselves and from the representations implicit in Andean narratives and rituals, centered on the Quebrada and Puna of Jujuy. It explores the representation of space as “otherness”: as a living space that radically interpellates the subject. This otherness does not appear as “landscape”, but as an unsurpassable “experience” that exceeds human actions and capacities.
This interpellation takes different forms. Here, we seek to thematize it through narratives related to health and illness. The essay addresses the “places”, objects, and actions that affect the subject and force the intervention of powerful figures—healers—who deploy material and spiritual procedures capable of conjuring this destabilizing otherness.
It is argued that there is a co-relation of mutual engulfment between human beings and space, and that this representation of space may be understood as that of a political “other”, in a broad sense of the term.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The author/s grant exclusive license without temporary limit for the manuscript to be published in Cuadernos-FHyCS edited by Humanides the Faculty of Social Science, National University of Jujuy.
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