Offerings to the Pachamama/Mother Earth in Diaguita villages in northwestern Argentina. A view of the territory as a political surplus

Abstract

This article reflects on the political role and agency of the territory and its potential to think critically on the practices promoted by native peoples in contemporary Argentina to defend their territories. It is based on the ethnographic analysis of the experiences of two Diaguita peoples, Los Chuschagasta and Tolombón (Choromoro Valley, Tucumán, and northwestern Argentina) in the framework of territorial conflicts during the last ten years. The article focuses specially on the practices and experiences of offerings and celebrations to the Pachamama/Mother Earth, considering these territorial events and, the territory itself, as political, performative places and excesses where permanence and belonging to the territory are settled, rather than a static, essentialist and folkloric interpretation. In this sense, the offerings and ceremonies to the Pachamama make up territorial practices that, in the identity-cultural framework, claim processes and conflicts, drive and update the political project of territorial defense. The offerings constitute uses of the territory, spiritual moments, encounters with the ancestors, which are far from the way in which the hegemonic power, both from the state and |private, conceives them. Finally, it is expected to contribute to the analysis that relocates these other places of enunciation, which includes non-human entities, as surpluses of the multiculturalist indigenous policy with its logics and languages ​​of tolerance.