Forms of relationship and sociality in the South American Gran Chaco

Discover the first session of the 2025‑2026 Americanist Anthropology Seminar: "Forms of relationship and sociality in the South American Gran Chaco ".

"Based on two decades of ethnographic research among the Qom people of the Argentine Chaco (formerly known as Toba), the presentation will focus on what has been called an anthropology of relationships. The analysis of the forms that relationships take in this society of the South American lowlands will contribute to the dialogue with Amazonian ethnology on Native American modes of identity and sociality formation. We will see that in the Gran Chaco, the principle of difference as the basis of relationships seems to function differently from what we know in Amazonian ethnology. Certain aspects of witchcraft and revenge suggest that the socius and the person in the Chaco are not only produced by the absorption of difference, but by an alternation between mechanisms that promote excessive relationality and others that generate disjunctions in this relationality. This alternation between connection and disconnection, to use M. Strathern's terminology, would suggest that the Gran Chaco constitutes a shift between a Euro-American model of relationship based on the principle of similarity and an Amazonian model based on the necessity of difference."

• Florencia Tola – CONICET, IDAES-UNAM (Buenos Aires)
• Discussant: David Jabin – IRD, CESSMA