Sortis du bois. Les nouvelles formes de visibilités des Wichis du Nord de l’Argentine

• Main Authors: Alberto Preci, Pierre Gautreau, Bernard Tallet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille 2020-06-01
• Series: Espace populations sociétés
• Subjects: Argentine; Wichi; mobility; regimes of visibility; indigenous territoriality
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/eps/10047

In South America Indigenous peoples recently gained a new “visibility”. To understand this dynamics, we propose a new approach which goes beyond the study of institutional mechanisms of (in)visibilisation to recognizing the protagonism of Indigenous peoples. Based on the Wichis case, who live in Northern Argentina, our aim is to put at the core of the analysis the indigenous’ space practices in order to understand to what extent their territoriality allows them to make them visible. To do this, this article analyses their mobility and recent integration in urban areas. Thus, we identify different “regimes of visibility” in the sense of dynamic assemblages of institutional and spatial elements, which can vary over the course of time as well as coexist depending on the given location. The new visibility forms’ analysis open to question the essentialization of Wichi identity as well as it gives us the opportunity to propose a geography of their visibility.