MYTH-O-LOGICS OF THE DEVIL IN THE ARGENTINEAN CHACO

Authors

  • Pablo Quintero Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22456/1982-6524.54704

Keywords:

devil, myth, History, indigenous peoples, Argentinian chaco.

Abstract

Since the Hispanic period in America, the broad region of Chaco, historically inhabited by many different indigenous ethnic groups, was represented as a geographically united to colonial and post-colonial imaginaries of heresy and barbarism, developed by hegemonic sectors linked at first to the Spanish ecclesiastical-monarchy administration and later, in the 19th Century, linked to the government and the military corporation of Argentina. These imaginaries have been represented through different mythological incarnations around the figure of the devil that symbolized an alleged malignity of Chaco, and of which mythological narratives have been arranged, projecting a bicephalous logic of explanation/resolution to the mentioned negativity. In the 20th Century, subaltern indigenous sectors of Chaco, produced, in turn, a mythological narrative that gave new meanings with a different direction to the previous demoniacal representations. This article’s objective is to describe and explore analytically the cultural logics that imply the configuration of these different “myth-logics of the devil”. This work highlights the necessarily historic nature of the myths and the centrality of power as a constitutive dimension of the mythological narratives created in the Argentinean Chaco about the different demoniacal characters that appear over the centuries as incarnations of a particular rhetoric of hegemonies and subalternities.

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Author Biography

Pablo Quintero, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Doctor en Antropología por la Universidad de Buenos Aires, Master en Ciencias Sociales por la Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (sede Argentina), y Antropólogo por la Universidad Central de Venezuela. Investigador posdoctoral del Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social y profesor del Departamento de Antropologia de la Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Published

2015-06-29

How to Cite

QUINTERO, P. MYTH-O-LOGICS OF THE DEVIL IN THE ARGENTINEAN CHACO. Espaço Ameríndio, Porto Alegre, v. 9, n. 1, p. 239, 2015. DOI: 10.22456/1982-6524.54704. Disponível em: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/EspacoAmerindio/article/view/54704. Acesso em: 24 apr. 2025.

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ARTICLES