Comechingones and their descendants: Discursive formation and effects of power in Córdoba, Argentina.

Abstract

In the reemergence of Indigenous peoples in Córdoba since the 1990s, the Comechingón ethnic category dominated self-descriptive processes over other ethnicities that we can recognize in ethnographic work, such as Sanavirón and Ranquel, or pluriethnic, in the recent modalities of group formation. Knowledge regimes structured over the long duration of history configure Córdoba as a provincial formation of specific alterity which administers the sociocultural diversity within it in different ways and at different times, instituting a total provincial history that extinguishes and preterizes Indigenous people under civilizing devices. To explain its scope in the present, the work aims to identify and restore narratives about the extinction of indigenous people in Córdoba inscribed in the expropriating praxis of provincial governmentality and in a corpus of academic works published in the last century, as central agents of erasure. The discursive effectiveness of narratives is elucidated by the hegemonic or authoritative position that the State and the academy have to make a genealogy of ethnic demarcation through the identification of the mechanisms of disposition of knowledge that they promote, the validation criteria that they seek to impose and their power effects on the population.