CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

We present our ethnographic approach to the characteristics and tendencies of the relationships between human communities and their environment from the analysis of subsistence activities performed in the domestic sphere. Taking as starting point the selection of such analytical descriptive unit, we depict some results of our ethnographic work in two types of settlements whose characteristics shows the biological and cultural diversity inherent to the rural area of the Argentine territory: 1) peasant communities in the Andean region of the province of Salta, NW of Argentina, 2) aboriginal communities Mbya-Guarani in the subtropical forests of the province of Misiones, NE of Argentina. From this perspective, developed throughout almost three decades of research, it was possible to consider the human adaptability in the context of routine practices in which conceptions and experiences are updated and reshaped around an environment that is, at the same time, transformed. There is a necessity put forward to carry out studies on a micro-scale of the strategies of surviving to a domestic scale, to propitiate the recognition and preservation of knowledge and practices resulting from centuries of human adaptation to different ecosystems, in the frame of new modalities that productive processes adopt nowadays. The possibility of a deep study of everyday activities of human groups with a long history of settlement in specific environments allows us to have access to dimensions of the relationship man-environment that result opaque in a macro-analytical consideration.This approach permits us to have access to different alternatives and groupal answers in relation with the environment and with it to aspects of intracultural variability and adaptability, the knowledge of which results indispensable if a rational handling and consequently a sustainable development of natural resources of an area are wished to be obtained.

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