RUNA, archivo para las ciencias del hombre

Towards an Anthropology of the Anthropocene

María Inés Carabajal — 2025-01-30

Is there room for Indigenous knowledge in global climate science efforts?

Renzo Taddei — 2025-01-30

Climate, Economy, and Modernity

Noelia Figueroa Burdiles — 2025-01-30

This article explores the interaction between climate, economy, and cultural diversity in Arauco Province, Chile, from a socio-historical and decolonial perspective. It examines how Mapuche traditional practices and modern climate change policies can be linked to sustainably manage natural resources and protect indigenous rights. The study proposes adopting a biocentric paradigm that recognizes nature as a subject of rights, emphasizing the importance of biocultural ethics and transdisciplinarity in research and public policies on climate change.

Islands in transition, or adapting in the Anthropocene

Matías Fleischmann González — 2025-01-30

The Anthropocene demands a reconsideration of the role of human agency in the geological and climatic transformation of the planet. The primary mechanism through which we have impacted the planet has been the production and use of energy. However, energy is also crucial for human well-being in various forms. Considering the need to observe this tension at a local scale, this work analyzes, from a constructivist anthropological standpoint, two case studies of Chilean islands: Robinson Crusoe Island (Juan Fernández) and Llingua Island (Chiloé). From these islands, the relevance of local adaptation capacities is problematized, based on the concept of resilience. The main conditions that have hindered energy adaptation on these islands are discussed, and a brief discussion is proposed on the place of human agency in addressing the question of climate adaptation in the Anthropocene.

Towards a Chthulucenic Agriculture for Buen Vivir

Oliverio Gioffre — 2025-01-30

This article analyzes the process of cultural homogenization that occurred during the second half of the 20th century with the advancement of modern agriculture considering the notion of the Plantationocene and highlights the limits of the agro-industrial project in a context of persistent hunger as a global problem and escalating environmental risks. In this sense, it proposes a connection between the notion of the Chthulucene and traditional Andean agricultural practices based on a case study in the Ecuadorian highlands of Cayambe, where an ontology that transcends the classical division between nature and culture coexists with a mode of production that prioritizes the use of food over its exchange value.

Knowledge traditions and sociotechnical networks

Ana Padawer — 2025-01-30

The current ecological crisis calls for considering solutions that reverse or at least mitigate successive human actions that worsen the environmental and climatic situation. One such solution can be found in the substitution of products or goods that produce pollution, such as plastic objects. For some decades now, actors in the scientific-industrial field have been engaged in the search for such alternatives and are in the process of research and development of the so-called bioplastics, materials derived from biomass, of rapid environmental degradation and similar in their physical-chemical and mechanical properties to plastics of synthetic origin and slow degradation. As a result of field work carried out in a socio-technical network formed by a university laboratory and another lab from a cassava starch producing cooperative, in this paper we will contextualize the recent history of the development of bioplastics in Argentina, from a perspective that focuses on techniques and material developments from a processual and non-essentialist point of view. We try to demonstrate that techno-scientific practices and activities in formal spaces such as laboratories can be considered in themselves ecological phenomena, composed of certain interactions between humans and non-humans rooted in different traditions of knowledge.

The The meaning of "Nature" in its dialectical process of signification

Martín Prieto — 2025-01-30

This article inquires into the meaning of the category of "Nature" from a critical examination of the conditions of inquiry in the context of the global environmental crisis. An exploration in a dialectical key is presented from this point of view. The process of historical discontinuity and continuity in the meaning is reconstructed, with the aim of both revealing the range of notions and uses currently associated with "Nature" that constrain the systematic treatment of environmental conflicts and problems, and making these notions intelligible from the understanding of their implicit assumptions and conditions of signification, derived from the dominant historical directions in the interaction with the material surroundings. The historical turning points in meaning will be highlighted by virtue of two dialectical axes: those that have brought associated turns in the conceptualization of the "social", and that have led to reinforce the correspondence between broad epistemological programs of inquiry and economic-political models of governance and transformation of reality.

Narratives of the living

Laura Pérez — 2025-01-30

The article examines the environmental crisis from the perspective of art, questioning the modern epistemology that separates the human from the non-human and reduces nature to a resource. It proposes that art can facilitate interspecies dialogues and challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate inaction in the face of the climate crisis. Through the analysis of contemporary works, it explores artistic practices that encourage collaboration with living entities and allow us to imagine a future in which nature is not instrumentalised. It is argued that speculative thinking, in interaction with art, offers new sensibilities and opens up spaces for hope, promoting a reconfiguration of the links between humans and non-humans in the search for a livable world.

Childhoods, families and sexual abus

Julieta Grinberg — 2025-01-30

During the last decades, both at national and international levels, the problem of “sexual violence” against children and adolescents has been increasingly acquiring visibility in the public space. This article seeks to problematize the ways in which such violence is identified and signified, and through these operations the categories and the intelligibility frameworks available to feel, explain and act on them are also constructed. To this end, the article combines an analysis of the construction of sexual abuse as a category, as a social problem, and as an issue of the political agenda in the West with an ethnography of its daily treatment by organizations dedicated to the protection of the rights of children and adolescents in the City of Buenos Aires between 2005 and 2009, in the context of the institutionalization of the children’s rights cause.

Addressing gender violence in secondary school

Mora Medici — 2025-01-30

In this article we explore the approach to gender violence in a public secondary school in the City of Buenos Aires. Firstly, we investigate the way in which comprehensive sexual education allows generating instances of problematizing violence. Secondly, we analyze the ways in which this problem is present in school through conflicts between peers, such as those that arose from escraches due to gender violence. The processes of inter- and intra-generational dialogue that are generated in a context of transformation of gender relations and the potential of CSE in promoting a pedagogical approach to conflict situations are highlighted.

And how did they get here?

Luis Fernando Moreno Trejo — 2025-01-30

Between the years 2022 and 2024 I studied a Master’s Degree in Social Anthropology in which I developed an ethnographic work with women who were incarcerated in the Women’s Social Reinsertion Center (CERESO) in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico. Initially, I was interested, above all, in the experiences and processes of health-illness that are constituted within this Center. However, the fieldwork itself helped me to reflect and go deeper into dimensions that I had not paid attention to and that were closely linked to the experiences of illness. In particular, a series of temporary experiences of vulnerability, precariousness and violence began to stand out, which allowed me to understand how some stories prior to incarceration and at the time of being detained have articulated health problems inside the prison.

“Live lawly”: woman in the Chubut Police Records Fund (1940-1970)

Adalma Joselina Tapia — 2025-01-30

The Chubut Police Records Fund provides information on police identification practices in the transition from Territory to Province. In Chubut the opening of criminal records was inherent to all its inhabitants and was used as a tool of control, discipline, and surveillance. The records bring together various procedures, and the documents allow us to note that the identification process had particularities associated, for example, with the reason that opened the criminal record, physical and cultural characteristics, among others. It is argued that gender could have influenced the way of identification and characterization, especially of women. This process will be studied in more detail on a series of cases, with focus on the registration techniques and procedures. Analyzing aspects such as marital status, profession and/or political ideology will contribute to discuss the institutional perspective in the construction of stereotypes and role assignment according to gender.

A living organism

Cecilia M. Argañaraz — 2025-01-30

This article aims to explore various dimensions of hydraulic works from the perspective of one of the most important protagonists in their creation: engineers. Specifically, through a historical anthropology exercise, we have collected the discussions, problems and ideas about hydraulic works produced by these actors between 1890 and 1930. This article emerges from a broader investigation, which studied controversies linked to water in the 19th and 20th centuries in Catamarca valley (Catamarca, Argentina). Engineers, in this context, emerged as key actors who, we believe, allow us to densely describe the relationships articulated around waterworks. We especially want to cover the distance between the daily practices and discussions of these actors and the narratives and arguments that give the first a broader meaning. For engineers at the turn of the century, waterworks are, or exist through, discussions about salaries, the regime of rivers, the various options and technical problems; but they are also understood as living organisms that embody national progress and allow moral and material elevation to the members of a new civilized society.

Ethno-historical study of ancestral festivals in the peoples of the Andean world: Naván

Lucas Palacios Liberato — 2025-01-30

In all the villages of today’s Andean world, such as Naván, the Andean rites, the songs in Quechua, the music, dance and costumes of ancestral origin are still in force, which, despite being dedicated to Catholic idols, are not directly related to them. Our purpose is to demonstrate the pre-Hispanic origin of the festivities and their validity; to this end, we review the corresponding documentary sources and ethnohistorical research, and we relate our observations and experiences recorded during the visit of specialists from the Escuela Nacional Superior de Folklore José María Arguedas and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, whom we accompanied in 2007.

Lo The official, the forgotten and the popular.

Catalina Antognini — 2025-01-30

Puerto Pirámides is the only population center within Peninsula Valdés, province of Chubut. There, every September 25, National Southern Right Whale Day is celebrated, in commemoration of the successful rescue of a whale calf that occurred on its coasts in 2002. Over the years, this community has produced and reproduced this conceived through different strategies, thus transmitting it to the following generations. In this work we will seek to analyze the events that occurred on the 20th anniversary of Whale Day, the narrative divisions observed between different sectors of the community in charge of keeping alive the memory of what happened in 2002, but also of a more distant past. which is opposed to the present conservationist and protector of nature that has given it the status of Natural Heritage of Humanity, where the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources was the general premise.

The conflict and the community in the unpopulated andes

Cristhian Cerna — 2025-01-30

In this article, we present a description of how conflicts over the management of community property in the indigenous territories of northern Chile. Based on a case study of the Pueblo de Parinacota, an Aymara settlement located in the highlands of the Arica, we contrast primary and secondary information recorded in the network of community members settled in the local territory and the city of Arica through a multi-situated ethnography. As a result, from the description of two public-private investment milestones in the territory, such as the Church and the Maracanã Stadium, we explore the visions, discursivities, and practices that account for how the Indigenous community and external agents (public, private, and civil society) have interacted around the mitigation of local depopulation.

Pictures of childhood

Greta Winckler — 2025-01-30