Shaking Eden: Voyages, Bodies and Change in the Social Construction of South American Skies

ALEJANDRO MARTÍN LÓPEZ

Évora

Congreso; 19º Congreso de la Société Européene Pour L?astronomie Dans La Culture (SEAC) del año 2011 ?Stars and Stones: Voyages in Archaeoastronomy and Cultural Astronomy - A meeting of different worlds?; 2011

Société Européene pour L?Astronomie dans la Culture (SEAC), Portuguese Association for Archaeological Research

South America presents a clear example of the importance of displacements and exchanges in shaping human societies. Nevertheless, the academic production, following the ideas of the first European visitors, has tended to see it in terms of an undisturbed Eden in "state of nature." For too long, South American societies were thought as small units without history, isolated from each other. The reaction to the excesses of diffusionism helped to reinforce that image. But in recent years this static and "natural" representation has collapsed. New works from the most varied perspectives show us a changing and interconnected South America, where the notions of body, person and territory are complex social constructions and not the expression of an "unmediated" experience of the world. We discuss the implications of this new way of thinking South America for the study of the ways of perceiving and representing the sky in this region.To begin, the process of settlement in South America, yet opened to multiple debates, gives displacements a key role. The situation of the pre-Columbian South American groups shows the enormous importance of networks of exchange and mobility between them. Objects, people and ideas seem to have circulated in abundance. Large agricultural states and hunter-gatherer bands were not isolated; instead, they interact in complex ways. Many of the cosmological fragments we have from this period refer to displacements and changes, such as creation myths associated with the establishment of the Inca state. This is not something exclusive to the highlands, an example of this is the abundant Guarani?s cosmological material around the theme of pilgrimage to the ?Tierra sin Mal? -Land Without Evil-. That?s why, in the pre-Columbian South America, voyages, displacements and exchanges are fundamental for the construction of cosmologies and worldviews. Following Kusch?s line of thought, we can say that, in South America?s societies, ?being? is not only ?be standing?, but ?be walking?.Besides, studies make it increasingly clear the relation between body and territory. Bodies and territories that are conceived as fluid, multiple and porous.  What has the sky to do with this? Behind the explicit cosmological structures -holding and substantiated- there is a complex web of perceptions, representations and practices in every society that are a sort of basic substrate of assumptions about reality. Habitus, body and social trajectories are fundamental elements of the construction process of these worldviews and cosmo-praxis. Thus, the conceptions and practices about the body and the territory are directly linked to particular notions about the cosmos and the sky.Furthermore, and despite of what is usual in many cultural astronomy studies, we can not stop with the arrival of Europeans to South America. And if we do not, we must consider the enormous impact of it. This tremendous event added a dramatic series of changes to this already dynamic situation. The demographic impact, the military actions, the slave labor systems, the process of evangelization, the addition of European and African populations, the breakdown of state structures and their replacement by others, the territorial reorganization, the massive population displacement, the arrival of new ways of production, new technologies, plants and animals -including horse-, increased the role of change and mobility. New conceptions about the body, the territory and the cosmos burst on the scene. All of them increased the resignification processes and symbolic struggles.Then, the South American independence process and the conformation of national states, the presence of protestant missionaries and other religions, economic globalization, the mass media, etc., introduced major changes.In recent years, the debate about the relations between change and continuity, myth and historical consciousness have burst in South American studies. This implies a new context to understand the social processes of construction of perceptions and representations of the sky. A rich scientific production has addressed these issues from different disciplinary matrices. In this direction, we intend to explore new perspectives about the social construction of the sky in South America that are related to the discussion about these tensions between change and continuity.