Indigenous comunalizations in Patagonia in post-genocidal contexts (1885-1950)

DELRIO, WALTER

Potency of the Common. Intercultural Perspectives about Community and Individuality.

De Gruyter Oldenbourg

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2016; p. 361 - 376

In Argentina there exists nowadays a National Register of Indigenous Communitieswhich is, at the same time, copied by provincial registers.1 In orderto become part of these records, the government establishes a series of requirementsthat each community must follow to achieve official acknowledgment.The communities are expected to fill forms, choose authorities, make a council ofelders and submit a portfolio with the ?history? of the community and the foundationsthat probe that they belong to an indigenous People. Then, Governmentagencies determine the validity of each request seeking to certify the accuracy ofthe information submitted. These agencies tend to stress, first, the legitimacy ofthe indigenous people based in the continuance of territorial occupation, second,the cultural practices over the territory and, finally, the ties of affiliation of themembers in a historical dimension. These three issues allow the group to officiallyascribe as part of a recognizable and recognized people/tribe.This process started since the constitutional reform of 1994 and many thingshave changed since then on. A variety of different demands have argued againsthomogenizing State?s policies which often act in these processes of State recognitionof indigenous peoples. However, the processes of indigenous communitybuilding have always been paradoxically related to the State. This paradox revealssometimes as a political tension, others as an opportunity for politics and someothers also as obstacle or limit. On the one hand, the (national and/or provincial)State requires the cultural and social continuity of the indigenous communitieswhen, at the same time, we can identify a century of State policies aimed at theextinction of indigenous communities and peoples. On the other hand, from theindigenous peoples? point of view, been part of a community ? as a marked population? has enabled, both, the possibility of expropriation and the denial ofsome rights, and at the same time, the official recognition of membership hasenhanced other rights and it has become practically the only way to be acknowledgedas members of an indigenous people.These essentialist requests of social and cultural continuity of the indigenouscommunity are another dimension2 of the process of subaltern status constructionof the indigenous peoples as an internal-other within the nation-State-territorymatrix. Our aim here is to analyze different ways of understanding indigenouscommunalizations3 in relation to that process. Especially consideringpost-genocidal contexts in northern Patagonia between 1880?1950s.This temporal and spatial selection allows us to study the particular andcomplex relationships among three dimensions articulated by the conceptof indigenous community in this context: first, the affiliation with a broadersocio-political group (people / nation); second, the identification with certainsocio-cultural life and an imagined unity; and, third, the relationship betweenthe individual and the collective.