Anthropology

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Menara Guizardi
,
Claudio Casparrino
, and
Felipe Valdebenito

This chapter invites our readers on a visual journey through the Azapa Valley and the Agromarket, spaces that articulate Indigenous Bolivian migration in Arica (Chile). The chapter seeks to contrast the visual records and ethnographic field diaries with the information about these spaces detailed in the previous literature. First, it outlines Arica’s current social and economic configurations, providing demographic data on international migration in the city. Second, the profiles of the thirty women interviewed are examined in-depth, providing key information to situate their trajectories and testimonies (which will be taken up in the following chapters of the volume). Third, the Azapa Valley will be described, showing how its farmland has been transformed into one of the most important agricultural enclaves in the Atacama Desert. The chapter also presents the Bolivian women’s working spaces in the Agromarket of the city.

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Abstract only
Menara Guizardi

This chapter reviews Lévi-Strauss’s Alliance Theory, drawing on feminist critiques from the seventies and current archaeological findings to clarify the analytical frameworks of the book. It argues that Lévi-Strauss’s arguments are linked to a specific form of masculine domination that became hegemonic from the nineteenth century onwards (as a scientific, colonial, and Eurocentric discourse). The second section offers a brief glossary of terms on kinship (which will be useful for reading the whole volume), while the third indicates some interpretative reservations to be considered when reviewing the “classics” works of this anthropological subfield. With this background, Lévi-Strauss’s proposals on kinship are retrieved in section four. In the fifth section, the current archaeological findings on Paleolithic human groups are synthesized, providing scientific evidence that endorses a deconstruction of several of Lévi-Strauss’s maxims. In the conclusions, the definition of patriarchy as hegemony is proposed.

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Bolivian women and transborder mobilities in the Andes
Editor:

Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile’s northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits in the Atacama Desert, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are constructed in the (multi)situated experience of these transborder women. By building a bridge between classical anthropological studies on kinship and contemporary debates on transnational and transborder mobility, the book invites us to rethink structuralist theoretical assertions on the elementary character of family alliances. The women’s life histories and the ethnographic data analyzed show that the limits of gender are configured as a triad between gender violence, kinship restrictions, and female mobility for the study’s protagonists. This contributes to denaturalizing both the androcentrism of the classic arguments on kinship and the emphasis on the experiences of circulation of contemporary theories. Consequently, this book also contributes to the field of border studies by overcoming the insistent invisibility of the role of women in border regions through a model of analysis that privileges female discourses, experiences, affections, and practices. The book’s focus on the reproductive tasks performed by the women allows a rethinking of the relationship between gender violence and female care as a key element to the survival of Iindigenous groups in border areas.

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Menara Guizardi
,
Esteban Nazal
, and
Lina Magalhães

This chapter begins the analysis of the life-history interviews of the Aymara women who inhabit Arica (Chile). First, the initial work experiences of the interviewees are described, shedding light on the gender relations in their Bolivian Aymara communities. Then, we analyze the relationship between kinship and the obligation of mobility that weighs on women, which is illustrated through Casimira’s life history. The chapter also describes the economic and political macro-global processes that traversed these Aymara communities in Bolivia, exploring how the women act by transforming as well as reproducing communitarian kinship and gender structuring in contexts of social change. The last section returns to the debate on the elementary structuring of patriarchy, showing – now based on ethnographic data – how the constitution of a triad between the Aymara kinship systems, gender violence, and female mobility has shaped the transborder trajectories of the women.

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Menara Guizardi
,
Carolina Stefoni
,
Isabel Araya
,
Lina Magalhães
, and
Eleonora López

This chapter addresses the episodes of gender violence narrated by the Bolivian Aymara women interviewed in Arica (Chile). Its objective is to analyze specifically those female experiences that take place in “the hidden sites of violence”. That is, the aggressions suffered by women in their family environment, where these facts remain hidden, although they often take place in plain sight and with notorious consequences. The chapter returns to the narratives of the thirty interviewed women to describe the aggressions perpetrated by the male figures of their families of origin (fathers, brothers, stepfathers), but also by their mothers. In addition, it analyses how these abuses are repeated in the relationships these migrant women build with their own partners and their children. It shows a difference in the intensity of violence and the protection mechanisms found against it on the Chilean and Bolivian sides of the border. Indeed, the recognition of this difference motivates female transborder mobility.

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Menara Guizardi
,
Felipe Valdebenito
, and
Pablo Mardones

The chapter offers a historical reconstruction of the relationship between gender, identities, and human mobility in the territories of the Andean Tri-border, focusing on the outskirts of Arica (Chile), where our ethnography was carried out. Based on a review of the previous literature, the chapter analyses historical elements to interpret the current experiences of Bolivian Indigenous women in these areas. It will start by characterizing some of the identity tensions of the territory in the Tiwanaku and Inca Empires. It also discusses how the colonial order (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries) intensified patriarchal inequalities, increased gender violence, and imposed symbolisms and moralities that made native women inferior. Finally, the formation of nation-states (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is addressed, exploring how the wars that forged the borders between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia reinvented long-lasting identity conflicts. This war process further intensified patriarchal asymmetries, naturalizing the notion that border control enables the exercise of violence against women (especially if they are Indigenous).

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Abstract only
Menara Guizardi
and
Herminia Gonzálvez

This chapter summarizes the topics, hypotheses, questions, and theoretical proposals that structure the volume. It explains that the book results from an ethnographic study that inquired on the configurations of gender and kinship in Aymara groups and their relations with the transnational and transborder mobilities of the women of these communities in the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia). In that vein, it outlines the volume’s feminist anthropological perspective and its criticisms of the anthropological structuralist formulations on kinship and alliance in patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal communities. In doing so, it introduces the theorizing that links violence, kinship, and the mobility of women. The chapter also explains the ethnographic methodology adopted, outlining a feminist approach to the Extended Case Method. The fieldwork process is described, detailing the organization of the research team, its dynamics of reflection, the collection of empirical materials, the systematization of this data, and the analysis techniques applied. This is followed by a quick reading guide to the contents of each chapter.

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Menara Guizardi
,
Isabel Araya
, and
Lina Magalhães

This chapter analyzes the labor insertion of Bolivian Aymara women showing that their migratory experiences are constructed through transborder ethnic networks and resources. In addition to describing the labor niches of the interviewees, it states that their productive functions are doubly configured as ethnicized cultural and social capitals and as a gender mandate. This implies that these women exercise not only a “double” but rather a “multiple presence” related to the productive and reproductive overloads they must sustain. In doing this, they articulate their own mechanisms of resistance, developing forms of gendered knowledge that, on occasion, enhance some degree of female autonomy. This chapter also shows that the insertion of migrant women in commerce integrates a gift circulation system: it is structured around the specific way in which they incorporate the obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate. In performing their productive daily tasks, the women expand the practices of care they embody as a “gift” in their Aymara kinship networks

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Menara Guizardi
,
Herminia Gonzálvez
,
Esteban Nazal
, and
Lina Magalhães

This chapter complements the theoretical debates revisiting the anthropological studies on kinship among Aymara groups in the territories of the Andean Tri-border. Several worldviews that will appear in the ethnographic chapters of the volume are described and explained. First, the logics of Aymara symbolic complementarity are addressed. Their relationships to the patterns of kinship, mobility, and territorial occupation in different orographic platforms of the Atacama Desert are also discussed. Then, Aymara marriage (chachawarmi) and its connections with patterns of gender conflict are addressed, thus explaining the persistence of hierarchical forms of masculine domination. By exploring these debates, the chapter retrieves the current political debate of Indigenous women leaders in Bolivia, which makes visible the inequities reproduced when idyllic visions of gender equality in Aymara communities become mainstream political ideas.

in The elementary structuring of patriarchy
Abstract only
Gender and sexuality at the eastern borders of Europe

Borders of Desire takes a novel approach to the study of borders: rather than seeing them only as obstacles to the fulfilment of human desires, this collection focuses on how borders can also be productive of desire. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with sites along the eastern borders of Europe, particularly in the Baltics and the Balkans, the studies in this volume illuminate how gendered and sexualized desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. The book takes a performative approach, emphasizing not what borders are, but what borders do – and in this case, what they produce. Borders are thus treated less as artefacts of desires and more as sources of desire: a border’s existence, which marks a difference between here and there, can trigger imaginations about what might be on the other side, creating new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work, while also as enactments of political ideals or resistance. As the chapters show, sometimes these desires spring from orientalising imaginaries of the other, sometimes from economically inspired fantasies of a different life, and sometimes from ethnosexual projections or reimaginings of political pasts and futures. Taken as a whole, Borders of Desire offers new perspectives on the work borders do, as well as on the gendered and sexed lives of those in and from the eastern borders of Europe, and the persistent East/West symbolic divide that continues to permeate European political and social life.