Anthropology of indigenous territories: contributions to the study of the natures between Guarani and Chané of northwestern Argentina

Abstract

This article brings to reflection the approaches to territory and territorialities that anthropology has been developing in dialogue with other sciences in the context of the current environmental crisis, and tries to glimpse a methodological path that allows studying the complexity of indigenous territorialities in a relational to the different natures that inhabit these territories. In this sense, we reflect and work on the social role of these different natures (materialized in plants, shrubs, medicinal and food trees) in relation to humans and in relation to other beings, to study the ways in which the natural world is conceptualized and classified, and the ways in which humans interact with their “environment”. The methodology used for this study consisted of ethnographic work in the territory of Guarani and Chané communities in northwestern Argentina in the period from 2018 to 2021.

Keywords:
territories; natures; indigenous epistemologies; pluriverses