ETHNOGRAPHY IN BODIES

DOMINATION AND UNSUBMISSIVENESS IN EARLY XXTH CENTURY IN JUJUY (ARGENTINA)

Abstract

An alternative approach is presented to the texts written by Eric Boman and Eric von Rosen, who traveled and conducted research through east Puna de Atacama and Puna de Jujuy (today province of Jujuy, Argentina) between 1901 and 1903. I argue that taking on account open or elusive narratives about the concrete forms through which travelers and Indians related each other, it is possible to approach to relationships between nation-state and Indian societies, considering the ethnographic relationship as a part of them. For the sake of that approach, I have been able to watch the living space of social relationships where Indian peasants, military forces and scientific missions coexisted in conflict, as to inquire into that environment as a social life area, not just as an
“anthropological laboratory”.

Scientific missions took place during a prevailing military stage of Argentinean nation-state expansion. The state had some institutional presence there, but a very scanty material and ideological one. In that context, I show that proceedings followed in order to procure their scientific aims and to fulfill their practical needs in the field were, simultaneously, practices of nation-state domination over Indian society. At the same time, Indian reactions in front of that foreigners presence and their interaction proposals were inscribed as practices of unsubmissiveness against nation-state power.

This article takes a distance both politically and scientifically from any pretended historical relativism position about the domination practices of researchers. I argue that current subaltern position of Indian descendants in Jujuy (including those who met Boman and von Rosen) is reformulated in a dim way through the lack of social and scientific condemnation to the actors who were co-responsible for that position.