Reimagining the Gran Chaco
Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America

Silvia Hirsch (Edited by), Paola Canova (Edited by), Mercedes Biocca (Edited by)

9781683402114

Hardback, published 12 October 2021

360 pages, 16 black & white illustrations, 1 table
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.66 kg

“This book is the first of its kind and fills a very important gap in the anthropology and ethnohistory of the Gran Chaco, especially of the last thirty years. The editors have assembled an outstanding collection of articles by the top and well-recognized anthropologists working on the Gran Chaco.”- René Harder Horst, author of A History of Indigenous Latin America: Aymara to Zapatistas;

“A much-needed collection of ethnographies written by experienced field workers, useful for understanding what is happening right now with Indigenous peoples in the region. This book presents little-known facts from the viewpoint of localized researchers, unveiling the effects of ethnicity, culture, Christian conversion, national identity, exploitation, and dispossession.”- Marcela Mendoza, author of Juegos de combate entre varones de grupos etnográficos cazadores-recolectores.

This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region’s many indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms.

The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental and NGOs, and private businesses and how local actors are reconfiguring their subjectivities and political agency in response. With its multinational perspective, and its examination of major themes including missionization, millenarian movements, the Chaco war, industrial enclaves, extractivism, political mobilization, and the struggle for rights, this volume brings greater visibility to an underrepresented, complex region.