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OF APPARITIONS AND ALIANCES. VIRGINS AND TERRITORIAL HISTORY IN CATAMARCA (ARGENTINA)

DE APARICIONES Y ALIANZAS. VÍRGENES E HISTORIA TERRITORIAL EN CATAMARCA (ARGENTINA)

Cecilia Argañaraz

This article aims to systematize a set of reflections that place virgins as structuring figures of local ways of conceiving and building relations with the surrounding environment. The ways in which virgins, people, and the environment are connected have been subject of important transformations over time. The analysis of these relations can open doors to understanding the history of a territory, conceived of as a complex, deep networks of relationships between actors and heterogeneous elements. Starting from theoretical- methodological premises that focus on network-actors and tracking ideas (Ginzburg 1992 [1982]; Latour 2005), attempts are made to reconstruct a network of relations between virgins and other non-human actors. By focusing on the relationship between virgins, trees, and territorialities and their transformations over time, and presenting a case analysis in the Catamarca Province, Argentina, the study allows to understand the relations between virgins and environment as relations of antagonism in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and describe a movement of association and localization in the eighteent century, where virgins become part of a network of local territorial relations, along with previously antithetical entities, and then reappear as “antagonists” or allies of the armies during the independence wars in the nineteenth century.

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Tags: Catamarca, Territory, Historical anthropology, virgins, collectives

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