Forms of Relation in the South American Gran Chaco

Discover the first session of the 2025‑2026 Americanist Anthropology Seminar: "Forms of Relation in the South American Gran Chaco: An Analysis of Witchcraft and Vengeance".

"This presentation draws on two decades of ethnographic research among the Qom people of the Argentine Chaco. The research is situated within what has been termed the anthropology of relations, examining the forms that relations take in lowland South American societies and contributing to dialogue with Amazonian ethnology on Amerindian modes of identity and the construction of sociality.

The session demonstrates that, in the Gran Chaco, the principle of difference as the basis of relations operates differently from that observed in Amazonia. Aspects of witchcraft and revenge illustrate that the socius and the person in the Chaco are not solely produced through the absorption of difference. They also result from an alternation between mechanisms promoting excessive relationality and others generating disjunctions within relationality.

This alternation between connection and disconnection, following Marilyn Strathern’s terminology, suggests that the Gran Chaco occupies an intermediate position between a Euro‑American model of relation based on similarity and an Amazonian model founded on the necessity of difference."

• Florencia Tola (CONICET-Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales-UNSAM)