Un toro demoniaco en el velorio

Mito y reconfiguraciones socio-técnicas ganaderas en el contexto del agro-negocio

Abstract

The paper analyzes narratives of pacts with a diabolical bull, collected in the northeast of the Argentine province of Santiago del Estero. With his agency, this mythical animal multiplied the herd of the covenanter and promoted his social mobility, but upon his death he stripped the heirs of the estate. Like other oral stories, myths do not have highly saturated meaning structures. On the contrary, they tend to resignify themselves in the course of narrative practices, to the extent that they are intentional, contextual and suppose historical forms of relationship between humans and non-humans. According to the above, the myth constituted a knowledge that originally had as a correlate socio-technical networks of livestock breeding, which had gone through cyclical trajectories of boom and crisis, based on environmental processes and fluctuations in exchange networks. In the article I argue that the historical conditions for its reemergence in the current context are related to a new boom cycle, linked to transformations in the global agri-food system and the incorporation of technical resources that allow the intensification of production.