Ethnographic Travelogues Through the Argentine Chaco Current Shamanism: Between Healing, Power, and Tradition by Prof. Pablo Wright (CAS-E Fellow)

The region of the Argentine Chaco, located in the northeast of the country, borders Paraguay and Bolivia. It is home to numerous indigenous peoples, who historically were hunter-gatherers. Since the nineteenth century, they have undergone historical processes of colonization, resettlement, evangelization, and the advancement of the national State, involving cultural transformations influenced by globalization and religious transnationalization. Considering these processes as a key historical scenario, in this lecture I review my travelogues on contemporary forms of Wichí and Qom/Toba shamanism. They display an ample array of cultural forms that express symbolic creativity, sociopolitical agency, and reinvention of traditions. In doing so, resting upon my ethnographic experience in the Chaco region and academic literature, I point out central notions about ontology, power, disease, and therapy, and the ritual practices that condense them. Moreover, I analyze the sociological dimensions within which Wichi and Qom shamanism develop. They include individual shamans per se, and shamanic practices fused within the Christianized framework of the so-called iglesias indígenas (indigenous churches). My anthropological perspective combines postcolonial, hermeneutic, and phenomenological approaches, in dialogue with current critiques of ethnographic writing. The latter stresses intersubjectivity and the existential dimensions of ethnography as key to a deeper understanding of the construction of anthropological knowledge.